Scorched Earth Page 2

  Hearts hammering in my chest, I felt the low rumble of the tank company rolling towards us through the trembling earth. Before I shut my eyes, concealing the fire burning vitally within them, I noticed vibrating grains of black sand cascading over the edge of the crater and was put in mind again of the hourglass. Then I surrendered to the dark and hoped it would not be my last sight.

  Usabius's prediction about the armoured company's arrival saved us both. Death on Isstvan was swift, usually instantaneous. Whatever order had once held sway in this force was gone as Legion commanders left only their worst, their dogs, behind to hunt and scrape our feeble resistance from this world. Soon the legionary-hounds would retreat too and anything that had escaped their teeth and claws would be atomised from orbit.

  I tried to focus, concentrate on the act of subterfuge that was necessary for my survival, however much it galled me not to take bolter and blade to these traitors. Some had tried. They slept in craters like the one in which we were hiding. Dwelling on the myriad ways I might meet my own demise would only bring it about quicker. So I let my senses bring me back to the present.

  It was an unpleasant reunion.

  Blood scent, old but still wet, crept into my nostrils. The taste of metal tanged my palate. Decaying flesh was redolent on the hot air coming off the tanks. Visions of the unquiet dead, mouths agape with tongues lolling through nubs of broken, black teeth, returned. I could crush the nightmare in my head, but the stench would not abate so easily. Without the air filters in my battle-helm, I almost gagged.

  The hard chank of brake blocks, the heady pall of heat from still-cooking engines, announced the tank company's abrupt halt.

  'Thought I saw movement this way,' a grating, iron voice said like two rusted girders scraping against one another.

  One of Perturabo's sons.

  Hate practically emanated off the legionary in waves. I expected to hear the clank of booted feet against a tank's hull, the dull resonance as they stomped down the rungs of a ladder attached to its turret and finally the crunch of earth beneath a heavy tread.

  Close inspection at the end of a bayonet would undo our efforts. My gladius was within reach and short enough to draw without needing to rise. I resolved not to go down without a fight…

  Instead, I heard a metal creak and the low fizz of a lamp burning into life.

  Seconds later a cold, harsh light oozed into the crater and I resisted the urge to crawl deeper into the morass of bodies. Even with my eyes closed, I could detect the change in light and hoped the infinitesimal reaction of my eyelids would not give us away. It moved slowly, like a slick, painting my armour with greasy, oleaginous fingers. I remained still, pretending to be dead, unsure for a moment if I was not dead already, and let the searchlight strafe.

  I heard the tanks growling nearby, guttural, bestial. The stench of promethium was noxious. Their crews were talking to one another, though I could not discern what was being said over the comm static. It sounded like a question to whoever was on the searchlight in the turret.

  The legionary's answer was all too audible.

  'Fire's killed most of them. A few are still fresh, though. We could burn it out again.'

  I am a Salamander, born from fire, but even my endurance would not allow me to survive a promethium bath.

  There was a pause as whoever was inside the tank replied.

  'At your command, sergeant,' answered the turret-man, and relief washed over me like a balm.

  The heat of the searchlight passed, evaporating like a very real weight lifting from my back. I allowed my heart rate to go back to normal just as the Raven Guard began to stir.

  Half-delirious with pain, our brother could not have known our predicament, nor the fact that he imperilled us all with his untimely return to consciousness.

  Daring to open my eyes a fraction, I saw the Raven Guard trying to move but was too far away to do anything about it. The tanks that had just begun to roll out again seemed to pause. I heard the legionary in the turret, the crackle of his vox as he told the driver to halt.

  Usabius was glaring at me through the cracked left lens of his helmet. It was badly split and I could clearly see the fiery glow of his true eye beneath it. In our frantic flight, our wounded companion had ended up right next to him.

  Tracks were grinding against earth, against sand, against bone…

  The Iron Warriors were turning back!

  Usabius did not stop glaring. As first I thought he was trying to prevent our discovery through sheer determination, as if by willing it we would become invisible. It was only as I reached, millimetre by agonising millimetre, for my bolter that I realised he wanted my permission.

  If he did this, it would be on us both. He could not carry the burden of it alone.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I nodded.

  From above, the sound of shifting armour was different - the lead tank was moving alone, returning for a last look with the baleful eye of its searchlight. In the few seconds remaining to us before it reached the edge of the crater and picked out the wounded warrior stirring in its bowels, Usabius reached over with the power fist he wore over his right hand, slowly formed a vice around the Raven Guard's neck and squeezed.

  The struggle was momentary. Usabius had to leave his hand there as the heat of the lamp returned.

  No more moaning, no more stirring. Our deception was airtight, our hiding place in plain sight secure…

  …our consciences indelibly tainted.

  We waited in the dark for several minutes until the light had gone and the sound of grinding tank tracks faded, as the Iron Warriors went to look for more survivors to kill. Yesterday we could have roamed this region of Isstvan and been unlucky to encounter a single living soul, but the status quo was changing. Search cordons were widening and with that our chances of discovery increased. The desire of the death-squads to linger over their prey was the sole reason for our stay of execution, the only thing keeping us from the notice of our enemies.

  It would not last, and I felt that a few more days, maybe less, remained to us.

  Horus was coming, or at least his mad dogs.

  More and more, we were being forced to head deeper, farther from the ship and closer to the Urgall Depression where so much blood had already been shed. Time was the only thing we had left, and a slim hope that we would find what we so desperately sought. What then if we did? Nocturnean pragmatism told me we would determine that when it was prudent to do so.

  Only once I was certain the Iron Warriors had gone, I rolled onto my back and had to grind my teeth to stop from shouting out.

  I met Usabius's gaze, still staring at me across the pile of corpses, and recognised his anguish as the mirror of my own. We had just added another to its grim tally.

  'I want to kill…' he murmured, '…all of them.'

  'Let's just get back to the Purgatory'. Feeling the weight anew, I struggled to my feet and went to help Usabius, who refused.

  'Come on,' I said, hooking my arm underneath the Raven Guard's instead.

  'He's dead.' Never had a more obvious fact been pointed out to me.

  'Haukspeer can remove his gene-seed,' I replied.

  If Usabius thought anything about that, he kept it to himself and grabbed the dead warrior's other arm.

  As we hauled him from the pit, our armour smeared with the blood and ash that had once been our brothers, I grimaced.

  'Your leg?' asked Usabius.

  My hand went down almost involuntarily to the crude armature encasing my left leg.

  'Ruuman does exceptional work but even his skills are being tested in this hellhole,' I said.

  My leg was broken in three places. Haukspeer's diagnosis was four radial fractures of the femur with the fibula and tibia badly splintered. I often pictured the bone jutting from my skin under my armour. Pain suppressors in my system, augmented by what our Apothecary had scavenged, kept me conscious; Ruuman's metal leg brace allowed me to walk, but pain and dysfunction were hampering
locomotion.

  Billowing smoke clogged the air in the distance, exhaust fumes from the tank company. Other shadows were moving in the gloom too, some in our direction. More death-squads, I reasoned. Something larger too, shambling awkwardly on long, stalk-like legs. I caught the red flash of its receptor-pits before my brother's voice recalled me.

  'It would be easier without the body.' Usabius's implication was almost telegraphed, but echoed what I had been thinking.

  My response was unintentionally glib. 'It would be easier if none of this insanity had ever happened.'

  Self-indulgent fatalism was pointless. I had already seen several Iron Hands succumb to it, only to die in needless acts of suicidal heroism. Sulnar would have come close were it not for Haukspeer dragging him aboard our drop-ship. I do not think the Medusan really forgave him for that. He had wanted to die with honour, but now he could not even do that. I supposed the death of a parent would do that to a son, drive him to insane acts, then tried not to wonder at the fate of my own father.

  'I can make it,' I said, climbing fully from the crater and knowing we needed to bring something back with us.

  'Even if we have to avoid them?' Usabius replied, jabbing a finger in the direction of two walkers that slewed around towards us without warning.

  We sank down as one, only crouching this time as the misshapen walkers quickly turned their crimson attentions elsewhere. We heard them ''speak'' to one another in half machine-code, half animalistic bark, and I struggled again to reconcile these abominations with the other creations of the Mechanicum. Even the death-squads and the butchering cybermastiffs were cowed by the blind-hunters. The other shadows scurried away from them or simply stepped out of the walkers' path if they were bold enough, allowing them to do their grisly work unimpeded. I had not seen the blind-hunters during the initial assault and suspected they had been brought in later to cleanse and burn.

  Scorch the earth, then salt it.

  I gestured east. It would take us longer that way, which was fraught with its own dangers, but at least we would be getting farther and not closer to the blind-hunters. There were no crashed drop-ships this way, either, save for our own. Most of the vessels and what was left of their defenders were west.

  Usabius agreed, so we took my heading and trudged off wearily across the black sand.

  It would be quieter along these trackless plains, where the death-squads had yet to venture. After fifteen minutes, although I had not trusted my internal chrono for a while now, the flat desert gave way to rocky crags, then cliffs. Mountains we had dubbed the Blackfangs shouldered into view.

  Almost an hour later, creeping through the narrow passes, gorges and defiles, we reached the Purgatory.

  Shawled in drifting grey and white, it was just another lumpen rock amongst many others, the Salamanders green well obscured. Its wings were long broken, having cascaded into the deep ravines below. Once it was a Stormbird, designation Warhawk VI, but its days of soaring the skies and bearing angels of death were over. Even if they were still intact, the drop-ship's engines were fully burned out, black beyond redemption. Across its crumpled nose cone and prow, the glacis had completely blown out. Only a few jags of armourglass remained, like fangs in the mouth of a beaten beast. I caught the glimpse of a lone warrior standing in a cockpit denuded of anything of use. Tarkan raised an iron hand in greeting to us, a long-barrelled sniper rifle resting peacefully across his lap. Then he was gone again, blending into the shadows, ever vigilant. Our patient watchman had taken this eyrie as his post ever since some semblance of order had been established after the crash.

  It was he, in a moment of sardonic humour, who had named our ship and sanctuary Purgatory.

  No one gainsaid him. Haukspeer had even given an ironic thump of applause.

  Our dead passenger growing colder by the moment, Usabius and I passed under an arch of rock that joined the two peaks between which our ship was firmly wedged. From here, the tail end and cargo bay door abutted a broad causeway of rock that wended through the mountain. Like a fortress from ancient, simpler times our metal fastness looked down onto the earth below and our distant enemies gathering slowly, unwittingly to besiege it.

  Usabius lifted his hand to the sky.

  'Snow?' he said, regarding the white flakes dappling his armour. 'Perhaps the season is changing.'

  'No, brother,' I corrected him. 'It's just ash. They are burning again, more pyres in the hills.'

  Usabius did not reply.

  A cold wind was rising and it blew the ash high into the peaks.

  Our heads were bowed as we walked the last few metres to Purgatory's gate. Even in the relative solitude of the mountains, far from the Urgall Depression, the screams of the dead and dying still followed us.

  THE CARGO DOOR of the drop-ship squealed open on neglected gears, admitting the two of us into a broad bay thronged with warriors.

  I nodded to Vogarr and E'nesh, both Iron Hand and Salamander returning my greeting even as they aimed bolters at the void beyond the lowered ramp. Once the entrance to the drop-ship was sealed, announced by the pressure-hiss exhalation of pneumatics, they relaxed.

  Both legionary watchmen were battered, their armour held together by rapid re-soldering and hope. Each carried a bandolier of grenades too, a single pin pull required to ignite the entire cache and bring the cargo door, as well as much of the ceiling, down on top of anyone attempting ingress that should not be.

  Flickering lumen-strips overhead were hardly inviting but, as Vogarr waved us through, Usabius and I stomped noisily into the light, our heavy footfalls ringing against the metal deck underfoot.

  We were greeted by Haukspeer, who approached us down an avenue of gurneys and thrown-together bunks and looked down coldly at the corpse we had brought with us.

  'You do realise he is dead?' the Apothecary asked, wiping the beaded sweat from his alabaster brow. In the grim lighting of the cargo hold, his chalk-white complexion took on a visceral cast. His eyes, like chips of jet, revealed nothing.

  Carefully, we set the wounded warrior down, allowing the other son of Corax to examine him. There were flecks of crimson on the Apothecary's face; behind him, a blood trail left from where a terminal patient had been dragged away was being mopped up.

  With a flick of his wrist, Haukspeer engaged the spear-like syringe of his reductor. As he went down onto his haunches, he asked, 'Could you unclasp the breastplate, please?'

  Haukspeer had lost an arm. It ended in a cauterised stump just above where his elbow used to be. It did not seem to inhibit his proficiency as an Apothecary. No less than seventeen battle-brothers had been brought back from the brink by his skills. Many more continued to live because of his continued ministrations, the sixty or so that surrounded us now on the makeshift beds. This was Haukspeer's infirmary, and it was full to capacity. Several of the wounded had lost limbs or suffered from grievous burns. Others were blind or paralysed. Haukspeer kept them alive, though most were beyond the ability to fight. It was no army; it was a morgue in waiting. And Haukspeer knew it. I could see it in his eyes, the weary resignation growing with each hollow day that passed. This was not resistance, it was existence. The few Imperial Army troopers we had rescued died quickly and those that lived did so in a catatonic state of fear and denial. Some were used as orderlies, fetching and carrying, wiping up the blood, but that was where their usefulness ended.

  The Raven Guard Usabius and I had brought back was beyond even the Apothecary's ability to heal.

  I removed the breastplate, and Haukspeer retrieved the gene-seed. Once it was safely secured in one of the tubes attached to his gauntlet, he lingered over his battle-brother's grievous neck injury. Glancing at Usabius's power fist, reading the rigidity in my brother's body language, I knew he had made the connection, and thought Haukspeer was going to say something.

  He did, but not what I was expecting.

  'Ruuman is waiting for you in the armoury,' he said, turning his back on us, reabsorbed into his work.
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  We walked away from Haukspeer, through the ranks of bunks, towards the back of the cargo hold and the armoury beyond.

  'He knows,' hissed Usabius when we had parted the Apothecary's company.

  I nodded. Through my complicity and sanction, I felt as bad as Usabius looked but spoke no further on it. None of that really mattered now. I was not even sure why we had bothered to drag the poor dead Raven Guard across the sands of Isstvan, our insult only adding to his injury.

  I was startled as a legionary thrust out his hand to me, seizing my wrist.

  I did not recognise him but knew he was of my Legion. One eye was missing, crudely gouged out, and his right leg was severed near to the abdomen. A regimen of drugs hard-lined into his arm kept him conscious but barely lucid. It was much the same story throughout the cargo bay that now served as an infirmary.

  'You are Lord Ra'stan,' he said in a cracked whisper.

  'I am no lord,' I told him. 'Just Ra'stan now.' I put my hand on his chest to calm him. 'Rest easy, brother.'

  'I served in your company,' he wheezed, and tried to slam his fist against his broken plastron until I stopped him.

  My eyes narrowed as I sought the name. 'Ik'rad,' I said. He nodded. Smiled. Such a small thing that meant so much.

  'Did you find…' he asked, 'did you find him?'

  Something cold reached up from my gut and squeezed my heart. I was surprised how choked my voice was when it finally came out.

  'No.' Then foolishly I added, 'Not yet.'

  I had just made a false promise to a dying man.

  'Find him,' the wounded legionary breathed, strength fading as he released me and sank back onto his gurney.

  'I will try.'

  The Salamander had let me go, but my hand was still firmly wrapped around his forearm when I felt Usabius's grip upon my shoulder.

  'Ruuman awaits,' he uttered softly.