Chem dog, p.2
Chem Dog, page 2
Erase it all.
That was what she had told them. The orks had taken the tower’s bottom two levels. The bridge linking the top level to the next tower – the only route of escape – had been destroyed. None of them were getting out of here. Xerenz had to make sure none of First Jedduni Tower Guard’s intelligence and data got out either.
Troops were cracking dataslates using the butts of lasguns and casting papers and scrolls into open fires. Xerenz had ordered everyone to rip off rank, regiment and other signifiers from their uniforms, in case the orks tried to yield information from them if captured. The soldiers responsible for throwing them in the fire swore renewed allegiance to Emperor, world and regiment before casting them into the flames. What they were doing was necessary, but nonetheless sacrilegious.
Damned orks. This is what everything has come to. Desecrating our uniforms.
She didn’t blink or flinch when a string of laspistol cracks went off. Lieutenant Dervane was eliminating the cogitator servitors.
‘At least I won’t have to hear their infernal babble again,’ Xerenz muttered to herself.
The xenos will see the punishment done, don’t you worry.
Talking to a machine was heresy to some. The orks would see to the punishment for that as well.
Xerenz entered the deletion code, handed to her by General Prilsley before the officer blew her own brains out. Shitting coward, leaving us to deal with this. You could have at least done the work first.
There were several more laspistol cracks.
‘The servitors are finished, ma’am,’ said Dervane.
The colonel didn’t look up from the console. ‘Douse them in promethium then light them up. Take no chances.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ The lieutenant turned to see to the order.
‘Wait.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘When you’ve done that, go to the third level. They’ll need another lasgun down there. And we need more time to destroy everything. Make the green red for me.’
Dervane nodded, looked down, and saluted. Her hand was shaking. The reality of their situation had crystallised for her. It had finally hit her that they were doomed. It was amazing how the brain could shield a person from almost anything if well enough occupied.
‘Are you sure you don’t need help with anything else, ma’am, before…?’ she asked.
Xerenz heard the silent plea.
‘What I need is dead orks, lieutenant. And time.’
‘Y-yes, ma’am.’ Dervane saluted again.
Thirty local minutes passed. One by one, Xerenz sent her staff to the lower floors. There were less than a dozen of them left. The sound of her troops’ gunfire was more sporadic now. The orks had gained another two floors at least. She hoped Dervane was dead. It’d mean the xenos bastards couldn’t have their fun with her, at least.
There was nothing left. She looked around. Her soldiers were arming themselves, checking helmet chin straps and counting charge packs and grenades at a far slower pace than necessary.
‘There’s nothing left to destroy,’ Xerenz said. The soldiers all nodded. ‘Well done. I’m proud of this, even if we are defeated.’
Her soldiers stared.
‘You’ve earned the right to end things on your terms. Quickly. Painlessly.’
She picked up her bolt pistol. She’d never fired it in anger before. The great shame of rank, Commissar Tezeng had said. That man most definitely had fired his bolt pistol in anger, until he was blown to paste by an ork rocket three days ago.
Xerenz picked up her chainsword and triggered it. The weapon’s fierce buzz was angry. As if it was starving after being denied blood for so long.
‘Or,’ she said, ‘we can make the scum down there bleed. The choice is yours, I relinquish you from your duties.’
With that, Xerenz headed for the doors. She didn’t look back.
‘This is Commissar Hellane Filengah.’
She was crouched in a corner, whispering into a vox-recorder. Staccatos of explosions rippled both nearby and in the distance. Broken water pipes dripped and showers of sparks burst from shattered machinery and control panels. Las scorches, bullet holes and blood splatters dotted the walls, and chunks had been blown out of rockcrete pillars by shots and explosives. The only light came from a handful of flickering lumens that somehow remained active and the glow of a handful of screens showing nothing but green static.
‘The Bastion Ajaxus has all but fallen, the orks have overrun everything. They own the skies. There is no chance of escape.’
Hellane heard a crack above her and looked up. A jagged line had appeared in the ceiling above her. Then there was a groan.
‘Frekk,’ she grunted, crawling over the floor. Seconds later, beams, plaster, ferrocrete chunks and wooden boards crashed down where she had been. Panting, she took a position under an old desk, with her knees up to her chest. A tangle of broken black wires dangled from a hole in its surface, the copper points poking out of them like the tongues of venomous serpents.
Hellane closed her eyes and held her vox-recorder in front of her like prayer beads. This was the only thing that mattered now.
‘I’ve found them. I know who they are. They go beyond the Bastion. Crimson Arrow. Azure Barb.’
She opened her eyes and looked around. This had been her office. Dozens had worked here daily, rooting out heresy, quashing ill-discipline, doing the righteous work of the God-Emperor. Now it was all ruins. All of her servants and orderlies were dead, hacked apart or blown to pieces by the orks, or crushed by falling masonry. Some had been killed by retreating Imperial tanks. Hellane had taken the commanders’ lives for those failures.
Only by some twist of the orks’ unpredictably barbarous nature had she been able to make it back here. The xenos had taken it earlier, but moved on according to their ineffable foul whims.
‘What did you do with them?’ Hellane spat. The bodies of Imperial martyrs had been here. The orks had taken them. She didn’t know why. She didn’t have to, however, to know they were being desecrated one way or another.
‘You have to find this,’ she said for the benefit of the vox-recorder. ‘The safe is here. The dataslates are there. Black Thorn. Iron Bolt. It is hidden. The orks didn’t find it.’
There was nothing left to say.
Nearby there was a crater in the rockcrete floor. Hellane put the voxrecorder in there and covered it over with rubble.
There was little left to do besides wait for death. To her shame, Hellane wasn’t even armed. Her chainsword had been mangled by an alien brute who had crushed it in its power claw. She had run out of ammunition for her bolt pistol days before, found a laspistol to replace it, but had lost that weapon when she was caught in a large blast. Ending her life on her terms wasn’t an option. No, when more orks found her she would rely on her bare hands.
Hellane shook her head.
The Emperor is your strength. Despair is weakness.
‘They will not find me, I will find them,’ she said, standing up. She straightened her cap, then dusted off her uniform as best as she could. With a long exhale, she made to leave. The doors had long been blocked, but there was a hole in a wall, which she ducked and squeezed through sideways.
Enemies of hers were on the other side.
But they weren’t xenos.
CHAPTER I
THE BASTARDS OF MIDAS
Lord Commissar Hellugh Traig’s command bunker was as busy as Hasp had ever seen it. A binharic chorus of servitors burbled and babbled incessantly as reams of paper bearing orders and reports streamed from machinery in their bellies. Every station and readout screen had several officers and junior commissars studying it. A ceaseless cacophony of shouts and footfall from those same personnel added to the general feeling of fluster and mess. In the centre of it all, Commissar Bastun Hasp saw, was Traig himself, draining the last recaff from his mug as he sat at his desk. The man behaved as if nothing was happening all around him, completely at ease. Given the whirlwind of activity going on, one could be forgiven for expecting his desk to be cluttered. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The surface, made from old ammunition boxes, was clear besides the lord commissar’s ornate laspistol, bolt pistol and hellpistol, and a handful of neatly arranged dataslates and styluses.
Hasp stopped before the lord commissar’s desk, clipped his heels together and formed the Imperial aquila on his chest.
‘Reporting as ordered, sir.’
Traig had put down his mug and was reading a dataslate. He tapped it a few times with his stylus. He nodded to himself as he took in different details, or furrowed his brow. Several minutes after Hasp declared his arrival, the lord commissar put the dataslate down carefully, ensuring its sides were parallel with the edges of the desk.
‘Ah, Hasp,’ he said, as if Bastun had just that moment arrived. ‘Very good. What do you know about the Bastion Ajaxus?’
‘It fell to the orks six local months ago, lord commissar. I understand they rebuilt it and it’s three times the size it was.’
‘They’ve bitten off even more than they can chew,’ interrupted Traig. ‘Command has decided now is the time to retake it, clear it, sanctify it and re-establish it as an Imperial fortification. This gives us an opportunity. More than one, in fact. First, to see first-hand how other Imperial forces in the region are dealing with the orks. Secondly, there’s something there of use to me. I want you to find it. You can take Rastus and his Chem-Dogs. There are also some others you can take, to fill out the ranks. They were Squad Zakir, but I had to have Zakir executed.’
‘Rastus?’
‘Yes, I told you I had a purpose for them. I will say no more on the issue.’
Throne. Hasp had pushed for the execution of Rastus, and the rest of his squad, for the murder of a commissar during the Ninth Savlar Chem-Dogs’ most recent battle. They had been at the noose, ready, when Traig had spared their lives at the very last second.
But that wasn’t the only issue.
‘Find something…’
‘Yes, I believe it was fitted with a tracker,’ said Traig. He handed Hasp a small device that resembled a blank dataslate in miniature. ‘This will help you find it. It’s silent now, of course, because we’re so far away. But it will tell you when you’re close. For now, suffice to say that if you seek out the commissars’ tower in the Bastion, you’ll be heading in the right direction.’
Hasp gaped in disbelief.
‘Don’t you dare look at me like that, Hasp,’ Traig said. ‘You used a lifetime’s worth of mercy for insubordination when you… spoke out of turn at the last regimental public execution.’
‘Sir, I must say, locator or otherwise, this will be like trying to find an autopistol round in a stack of lho-sticks.’
‘Are you questioning my orders?’ Traig asked, looking Hasp in the eye for the first time. It was a look that brooked no discussion. ‘The attack begins in a week. I want you there before the start. I want you moving in with the main attack force. I don’t want anyone else’s troops getting there ahead of you. Don’t think I’m stupid, the orks will have caused Emperor-only-knows-what havoc inside the Bastion. It will only get worse once thousands of Mordians and Korpsmen have gone through it, Emperor forbid the Necromundans and Athonians.’
‘A week?’ Hasp spluttered.
The Bastion Ajaxus was many miles away. Imperial forces had been redirected to Kruxx – which lay close to the Armageddon Sector – in an emergency and were hugely overstretched. There were vast tracts of land they simply could not contest that were home to orks, deserters and the local human population, many of whom had turned to banditry. To reach the Imperial lines besieging the Bastion Ajaxus was not a simple matter of a decent march. It was to negotiate Kruxx’s own hellish landscape and fight through any number of ambushes and raids.
‘Yes. You had better get going,’ said Traig. ‘And stop acting surprised. I told you before that I kept Rastus and the others alive for something I needed doing that would likely kill them.’
‘You did, lord commissar.’
Frekk,’ said Hasp, standing outside Traig’s bunker. It was midday on Kruxx, but the thick cloud and smog cover made visibility weak, and was worsened by the activity going on all around. Cargo servitors dragged crates of ammunition towards the forward trench lines. Savlars walked to and fro, taking long drags on lho-sticks. All kicked up clouds of fine dust. Then a brawl between several of the penal troops broke out not twenty yards from him.
Bastards, he thought. Right in front of a commissar.
‘Stop this at once, mongrels!’ he roared, as a crowd of Savlars gathered around the fight, shouting and jeering. He saw currency and trinkets changing hands. They had already started betting.
Hasp pushed his way through the crowd. They barely resembled soldiers, apart from the poorly fitting vomit-yellow overalls they wore as part of their penal uniform, all of which were heavily soiled. Nothing else about them matched. No pair of combat boots was alike – Hasp recognised patterns from a dozen different worlds. Some of the Savlars towered over him, seemingly just slabs of solid muscle, where others stood scantly five feet tall and were so skinny their tunics resembled dresses. Everyone was tattooed, but the markings didn’t seem to share any commonality. The soldiers displayed a variety of patterns and symbols, crude words and phrases. Some were entirely covered, even going so far as tattooing their shaved heads and eyelids.
‘Make way, mongrels!’ Hasp shouted as he shoved through them. Many of the Savlars turned to him with their fists raised and scowls on their faces, ready to fight anyone trying to block their view. Some drew improvised blades. As soon as they saw Hasp, however, they backed down and looked away.
Cowards at heart, the lot of you. Dare call yourselves ‘dogs’.
The brawling Savlars did not stop even as he reached the centre of the circle, despite the fact the crowd had stopped cheering and shouting. None tried to tell the fighters, for fear of being dragged into the fray and also being held to account by the commissar.
Scores of them are looking at me, he realised. These mongrels need a show of strength. An example.
Hasp glared at the Savlars rolling around in the dirt. One had a man in a headlock and was punching him repeatedly in the face. Another shoved her opponent’s face into the gravel and held it there before slamming it up and down several times. The commissar drew Reaper, his bolt pistol, from its holster.
He was surrounded. Weakness was not an option.
The crowd might have expected Hasp to fire his bolt pistol into the air.
They were wrong.
Without hesitation the commissar lifted his weapon, pointed it straight at the Savlar smashing her opponent’s face into the ground and squeezed the trigger. Nothing remained of her head. Her body slumped to the ground, blood pumping from the vessels severed in her neck. The remaining brawlers were splattered with brain and skull matter. All three stopped where they were, hands in the air, shaking.
Hasp took his time to look every Savlar around him in the eye. He hadn’t lowered Reaper, dark smoke still drifting from its wide barrel.
‘Know this, mongrels,’ he said, carefully enunciating each word. ‘Disorder will not be tolerated. Your anger, your hatred, your desire to fight – these are all the bare minimum the Emperor expects you to bring here and offer to Him. Make no mistake, however – they are not to be wasted, least of all on each other. The ork makes you angry. You hate the deserter, and you crave to fight the murdering bandits the natives of this world have become. That is all. If what I have said turns out not to have been clear enough for you, remember my aim will not falter. I will not miss your disgusting, criminal faces.’
The Savlars were all staring at him, averting their gaze when he looked at them.
Hasp holstered Reaper.
‘Know beyond all doubt that I hate you more than you hate me.’
He looked to the three blood-caked brawlers. All were on their knees, their hands still up. He saw their arms were shaking with adrenaline, fear and tiredness.
‘You three will clean up this mess. Everyone else disperse.’
The Savlars did as ordered, leaving Hasp where he was. He eyed them all as they slunk off. Despite what he had just done, in front of all of them, in less than ten seconds they were laughing, shouting, pushing, shoving and insulting one another as if nothing had happened.
Mongrel bastards. I’m supposed to cross this wasteland of a world with a dozen of them.
I need Grukkur.
Hasp found Grukkur standing guard with two other ogryns outside an armoury. They all came to attention as he approached, though not at the same time, and their accompanying salutes were even less coordinated. Their hands, each one sporting a different number of fingers, flailed wildly to various positions. One of the ogryns stuck her tongue out of her mouth with the effort.
What else was I expecting? thought Hasp.
Thankfully, Grukkur was the only one who hadn’t made any mistakes.
‘Ogryn Grukkur,’ said Hasp, standing before him.
‘Yes, commissar, sir!’ barked the ogryn, staring straight ahead. As he did so, he held his ripper gun out in front of him across his body. ‘Ready weapon for inspection, commissar, sir!’
Hasp had known that Grukkur was as loyal and professional as one could expect an ogryn to be, but this took him aback. Concealing his surprise with a look of indifference, he took several steps forward to assess the weapon. From the front it was generously greased, and he could see not even a mote of dust, a marvel given the coarseness of Kruxx’s terrain.
‘Other side,’ he said.
