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I've decided to start trying to write stuff again. I'm starting off by exhuming some old stuff and tidying it a little, but hopefully I'll get on to new things soon. Let me know what you think!

War Stories

The sky thundered and the entire building shook as the three men ran at a stooping jog into the sepulchral war factory. Lines of half-completed battle tanks lurked in the gloom of the vast shed and the three men raised up to look around. They wore the imperial battledress of three different regiments and each was covered in a clay textured pinkish layer of intermixed gore and filth, their weapons slung over their shoulders.

“Get that door closed!” bellowed the oldest one, a great, greying, battle scarred veteran whose hair and beard flew about him in the gale blowing in through the shutters which the men struggled to close

“Lend us a frelling hand then,” called back the second man. Younger than the first, he was a man of middle age in the guard, wiry of build with a duelling scar across his right eye.

“On three,” shouted the third. The youngest of the three men he nevertheless stood the tallest, his helmet lost revealing his buzzcut hair and his dress tattered and muddied for all its newness. With a mighty effort all three men hauled down on the metal shutterdoor, finally slamming it home, shutting out the elements and deadening the sounds of battle. Relieved, the three men slumped down leaning their backs on the corrugated door, their breath steaming in the cold.

The oldest was the first to move. Holding two fingers to the side of his head he walked away from his fellow soldiers barking into his helmet microphone. The scarred one watched him go then stood with an effort and with a smooth and practised action flipped out from some compartment of his dress a packet of Lho smoking sticks and a heavy metal lighter. Lighting one up he worked it to the far side of his mouth then offered the youngest his hand, saying

“Lucian Stancato. I'm guessing that we're here for the foreseeable so how about we find something that'll burn?”

The kid took the hand, levering himself up. Stancato was surprisingly strong, helping the boy up with no apparent effort. Brushing himself off, the boy smiled and with surprising formality introduced himself as Private Jongen, saying that he was pleased to meet the older man.

“Bit of a cluster out there, eh?” Jongen said.

Stancato looked at the boy, then laughed.

“Nothing new there boy, nothing new there. Now, there must be some fuel around here somewhere.”
~

They had a good fire going when the older one joined them. Jongen had found and broken up a great deal of the wooden crates used to transport the parts the machines which fuelled the war outside forged into the machines designed to fight it. Next, while the boy had gathered sheetmetal around them in a circle to form a wind break and drawn up empty and rusted barrels to serve as seats Stancato poured promethium onto the mulched card packing from inside the broken down crates holding munitions to serve as kindling, lit the sodden mass with his lighter and then piled the wood high as the flames took hold.

“So, old timer,” said Stancato, looking up from his work at the fire, “how long are we stuck here for?”

The old man regarded Stancato disapprovingly.

“Less of the old timer,” he said. “Command say we're to hold position while they try and reinforce.”

“Reinforced?” The younger one blurted out. “There's nothing here to reinforce.”

The older man looked at him.

“I know that,” he said. “However, command do not and have decided to find out for themselves, so we may as well get comfortable.”

He sat on one of the drums with a sigh and warmed his hands at the fire. They were all three of them steaming slightly in the warmth of the fire and the mud was drying on their uniforms and faces and crackling as they moved.

“I gather you two know each other,” he said, looking about. The boy and the smoking man introduced themselves, Stancato then removed the burning tube from his mouth and held it between fore and middle finger then pointing it at the older man and asked,

“And what about you? What's your story, old man?”

The greying veteran glared at him for a moment over his arms crossed over his knees but then smiled grimly.

“I am sergeant Joseph Serra of the fourth Cadian rifles. I lost my squad out there.” At this the other men nodded sagely, remembering the brief rain of fire and blood that had driven them into this place of production. The three sat in silence for several minutes before Jongen finally spoke up.

“Do you guys know any good stories? I knew a guy back in basic that had a hundred of em, used to make sentry fly by they did.”

Stancato regarded the boy with a cynical eye.

“Why dont you start us off then kid? Since you've got these great stories from this guy of yours.”

Jongen looked taken aback for a moment then began. He spoke quickly and without hesitation or much movement.

“Well how bout I tell you about the last time I got stuck in one of these tight spots. It was about three year ago now an we was fightin them little grey Tau guys on Sumeria or Delph or one of those holes out in the galactic east somewheres. Anyway, all hell was goin on and we got holed up in one of those big old war factories they got out there and all those damn missiles was slammin into the ground and the whole damn place was shaking and all this dust kept fallin out of the roof and every now and then one of these big old girders would come plummeting down and stick in the ground, just like a javelin. So there we was, a bunch of new freshfaced recruits, all keeping our damn heads down and out of the way while all the smoke and flames came leapin in through the busted-out windows and through all that, all the dust and the smoke and the flames comes this old-ass commissar lookin like the vengeance of the emperor hisself. He'd been in a few scraps, that one had. His face all puckered up with long-healed scars and one eye gone completely, just gouged clean out, and over all that some newly-burnt skin from the heat outside and a new trail of blood leaking down from all around his scalp from under his hat like the inside of its brim was sharp or somethin. Anyway, this old boy comes all stormin in, I guess he lost his own guys somewhere along the way and he starts in on all this shoutin and hollerin like they used to give us back in boot. Get your asses up he starts in with an goin on about how we was all filthy and wrong in the eyes of His Holiness and all the while we're, whitecaps all, just sat there in this nice safe little hole we'd done made for ourselves and just starin up at this bloody, burned and bellowing ball of fury and rage and we just dont know what to do. We just freeze up there, looking up with our stupid wide whitecaps' eyes and so he takes another step and comes completely into the factory to better yell at us. Get to closer range I suppose. And just at that exact moment, just as he starts in on yelling at us, standing brace-legged in the doorway, in silhouette against all the madness and all the horror that was going on out there and gesturing with one of those big old officer's powered swords they give em, right then, at that very moment there's this huge bang. A missile or something must have finally hit the place, cos I swear the whole damn place shook like it was an earthquake or somethin and the ground bucked up like a scared horse. That last one must have done something really bad to the place cos over even this old boy's bellowing I hears this screaming, tearing noise and all of a sudden this massive Aquilla, and I mean massive, this thing must have been for one of those Leviathans command uses sometimes, I mean, this thing was longer than a baneblade, looked heavier too. This huge Aquilla just comes spinning out of nowhere and BAM, lands right on this old guy just where as he's standing there, no more than twenty feet away. The whole thing was so close to us that we all get splattered with this old guy's blood, all across my face and chest, and all across the other guys' faces too and so we're all lay there, in the middle of this warzone with all the fires ragin and the guns goin off and now we're all covered in the gore from this old guy and we just start laughing. Laughing and laughing our asses off. We just couldn't stop till we'd laughed ourselves hoarse. Funniest thing I've ever seen. Right to this day. Funniest damn thing.

As he finished Jongen leant forward and slapped his knee and laughed. Stancato let forth one laugh, like a dog barking. Serra smiled a thin and weary smile.

“Good story, lad,” he said. “Good story.”

“How about you, Stancato?” said Jongen. “You got one you'd like to share with us?”

Stancato smiled and leaned forward. He was still smoking and as he began his story he pushed his helmet off to the back of his head. When he began to speak at length Jongen and Serra noticed for the first time that he spoke Gothic with an accent they had not encountered before.

“The funniest thing?” he took a pull on the small lighted tube held between index and middle fingers of his right hand, then leaned back, crossing his legs in front of him at the ankles, resting the elbow of his right hand in the palm of the left which lay crossed across his chest. As he spoke, he flicked his wrist back and forth, the small flame leaving a faint trail of dirty smoke in the air.

“Funniest? I dont know about funniest. In fact I think I lost my sense of humour about these kind of things quite long ago. What I will tell you about is the thing that made me realise, really brought home to me, as you might say, exactly where we sit in whatever plan it is that He has come up with. I was a part of a small operation brought together by an agent of the Inquisition. There were not that many of us, perhaps a dozen or maybe a few more. We were veterans all, so we thought. This agent pulled us out of the crusade which went through the crypt worlds out past the halo stars about a decade ago and called us all to this planet the crusade had passed by as completely empty of all life, faithful to His Holiness or otherwise. We all arrived, all of us removed from our comrades, out of our regiment. I remember thinking that perhaps this would be a, a...”

here again he gestured vigorously with the smoking tube

“relief, I think perhaps I mean, from the front lines, where we had all seen men die. In any case, we all arrived on this planet, shuttled down there from the division cruisers, all to help this agent, whoever he was, explore what we thought was this totally deserted world. A world of dust and ashes. He was waiting for us, his face covered by a hood and his armour covered in the purity seals our priest used to hand out sometimes. It had been made clear to us that the orders this man gave were not to be questioned, and so we set out after him into this underground complex which seemed to be made of ancient stones. At first I thought that there was light coming into the place from the surface, but as we got deeper into it, it become clear that all the stones were emanating this green light. We got to the fifth level and came up against what looked to be a dead end wall and then this agent told us to be on our guard and he plugged himself into something in the wall and opened it. Inside this place were what I thought were statues standing in alcoves. We were told to move quietly and we did, following this man who we had never met before and whose face we would never see past these serried ranks of silent manshapes. We had almost reached the end of the corridor then the door the man had opened slammed closed and this green light came upon us. The first of the manshapes to move caught a man by the arm and with a single wrench tore his shoulder from its moorings. The second dropped like a shadow from the ceiling, caught another man by the jaw, under the chin I mean to say, and carried him back up into the darkness of the rafters before anything could be done. After that we ran. The agent led us on, deeper into the complex, and we laid down our own covering fire, blindly shooting behind us as these things stalked after us in the darkness like nightmare insects. Finally, they stopped chasing us as we reached another flight of stairs, which led down to anther wall. One man threw himself against it and was consumed by green fire, his flesh stripped away to his bones, flayed in an instant. The agent stepped up and once again plugged into something hidden on the wall. Again it opened and again we entered a greenlit corridor. There was nothing in the corridor. At least not at first. I remember, a wind brushed my cheek and behind me two men were snatched from their feet by what I would swear to this day was a flying snake. Again we ran, but the thing did not come again. Eventually we reached a final door, one much larger than those that had gone before. The agent began to work on the door. As he did, the manshapes came again. We held them off as well as we could, losing man after man as they slowly came time and again toward us. The door finally opened to reveal what we had come for.”

Here he uncrossed his legs and leant forward, the smoking tube casting dramatic upward shadows across his face.

“The door opened to reveal nothing. The room was utterly bare. There were no markings of any kind. The agent ran around the room, looking for some hint as to the chamber's purpose. We would have laughed the see the capering form which just a few moments ago had spoken with the voice of the Emperor himself, but the manshapes pushed in on us, clawing and tearing with steel fingers. We fought our way out and back to the surface. As we reached the final level only I and the agent remained. As we reached the final door and the agent worked to close it he was thrown back by a final arc of light as the door sealed itself once again. As he died, the agent pressed into my hand a data crystal which he claimed held all the intelligence he had gathered and that I should take his shuttle and explain to his masters all that had happened.

Here again Stancato broke off to take a long pull on the Lho stick, blowing the smoke out of the corner of his mouth to keep it away from the faces of his listeners then flicking the long cord of ash which marked the flame's progress along to the factory floor.

“I walked across the dead world's surface through a howling gale which whipped the surface dust into a stinging cloud, clutching the crystal to my chest with one arm and shielding my eyes with the other. The ship's autopilot took me to a black ship utterly devoid of marking, which I had not noticed during the descent to the planet. I explained to the docking authority what had become of the men I had served with down in the crypt and they opened the doors and welcomed me in.”

“I'll be damned,” Jongen broke in. “You're a full-on hero! What did you do to get busted back down here amongst us grunts?”

“This is the point of my story,” Stancato said. “I handed the crystal over to those hooded men who greeted me on the ship and they assured me of a safe placement once the data had been collected. I waited aboard the ship for two days while their cogitators and logic engines puzzled over what I had brought back. On the third day an old man came to my room, revealed his lined and aged face and told me that although the data collected from the crystal was complete, it was the rantings of a madman. It referred to star formations and even entire galaxies which either no longer existed or had only existed in the agent's diseased mind. I believe that my deceased comrades were decorated for their actions post-mortem. I, on the other hand, was dropped off at the nearest front-line planet and reunited with my unit with the last words the old man had said to me still ringing in my ears. He told me that those who had died on that empty world for a data crystal filled with useless and deranged knowledge had died doing their duty. Doing their duty.”

He sighed, pulled his helmet back down to its original position and flicked the tube away. It spiralled briefly in the air before disappearing finally into the darkness, its spark finally extinguished.

As he finished, Serra's headset began to squall and he picked it up again and moved out of the lee of the assembled sheets to answer it. Jongen leant forwards and spoke earnestly to Stancato,

“Is that true?” he said, “that the agent you worked for was insane? That the mission was all for nothin?”

Stancato smiled. “Perhaps then there is another point to my story,” he said. “Does it matter if it happened or not? It could be true, child, and is that not enough?”

Serra re-entered the glow of the fire. He took off his helmet and ran a hand through his grizzled and matted hair, then finally he put his headset down and sat down heavily on one of the unturned promethium drums.

“Well boys, we are officially stuck here for the night now. Command'll start shelling again bout dawn tomorrow, so we may as well get comfortable.”

“What about you, old timer?” Stancato said.

“Yea,” Jongen joined in, “you've been in the guard for years! You must have some great stories!”

The old man sighed.

“Yes, boys, it's true that I've bin in the guard for just about longer than I can remember, and I've probably seen some stuff that'd make you boys piss yourselves laughin, or just plain piss yourselves. But the damnedest thing I ever heard I heard way back in basic on Cadia.”

“So you gonna tell us or what?” Jongen piped up.

“Well, giving us one of those things wouldn't hurt your chances,” Serra said, smiling and gesturing to Stancato's Lho packet. Stancato looked hard at the old man, then sighed and pitched both the packet and the lighter across the fire to Serra, who caught them both with a nod.

“Well this story,” the old man began, leaning back, “I heard from this guy. Young one, he was, who swore blind that it was as true as the primer. Kid got so messed up about it, he ended up finding hisself wanting before old Commissar Bone back there on Cadia ever got a hold of him.”

“You mean....” Jongen began.

“Fraid so, young 'un,” the old one said. “Stuck a bolt pistol in his mouth the day before we was all ready to ship out. Emperor alone knows where he got hold of it, but took His mercy into his own hands.”

Serra tapped the Lho packet on his knee then took out and lit one of the sticks and leaned forward and passed the packet and lighter back to Stancato, then leant back once again, pinching the stick between thumb and index finger, breathing the smoke in through his mouth and out through his nose as he began his tale.

“Not bad stuff, Stancato. Better than we used to get back when I joined up. Anyways. This kid, before he blew his brains all over the bunkhouse floor, this kid told me this story. Said he found it all out when he went back home for his grandfather's funeral or some such thing. This kid's grandfather, or was it his great-uncle, or whatever, was a hangman. Retired from the service on some medical grounds or other.”

“Hah!” Jongen started, “I knew this guy back in basic who wanted to get out on a medical, so he took his sidearm and he....”

Jongen stopped here, silenced by a glance from Stancato. Serra nodded his thanks then took another pull from the pinched Lho and went on

“An' the thing we all knew was that this kid came from a world which we had never heard of, not a one of us. So we go all through basic together, make it all the way along to where we're ready to go get passed out and we get all this way along without ever once mentioning home. I guess basic's a bit like ops like that, a man dont hardly talk about where he's come from cause he knows he aint gonna be seein it again. So we get all this way along and like a month before the passin out parade this kid dashes off home to this backwater agri-world no-one's ever heard of and he comes back like three weeks later and comes back lookin the most strung-out I've ever seen a man, and that includes those I've seen comin out of forests covered in bug slime. We were rooming together by this point, being seniors and all, and we get to talkin and I ask this kid how home was and he tells me the damnedest thing.”

Serra leant forward and blew smoke from his nose in two jets over the fire, then stared into the coals for a moment before going on.

“This kid tole me that his home was damn near blown up for harboring a damned Slaaneshi cult. Think about it! Some green rock with the population of about seventeen and this thing goin on! That was the real reason he was called home. Of course, I'm amazed by this an I ask him how come it is that the place wasnt blown all to hell and why it is that the kid is allowed to come and be in the guard with all this in his world's past an he tells me that it weren't no cult and that this is what's gotten him buggin out. The hangman who was this kid's grandfather or granduncle or whatever, the kid always assumed had never done gotten married. You know, there were no kids and no sign of any missus at all. Seemed odd, but not that odd as the only thing the kid ever knew about this man in life was that he crawled himself into a snakebite bottle and did his damndest to stay there. But when this ole bastard was finally laid in the family crypt, he got laid alongside this woman, all preserved like, just like they have for war heroes. So this kid gets all suspicious and starts pokin around. Asks the old boy who lives across the way. The old boy remembers the wife for sure but tells the kid to go ask his father, it aint his tale to tell, Inquisition on the way or no Inquisition on the way. So the kid goes and asks his dad and confronts him. Asks him about it all; the Inquisition getting set to blow them all to pieces, the woman, what the ole boy had tole him, everything and the dad, who had gotten pretty drunk by all accounts, tells him. The hangman came back out of the guard. He was born on this rock, you see, the hangman that is, and asked to be sent back there after he got wounded. And he brought this girl with him. Beautiful, she was, tall, slim, dark black hair, and about twenty or even thirty years the 'sar's junior. Now on this rock was the rest of the hangman's family; paw and maw and three grown up little ones, the second one all ready to be shipped out to the guard. The old man takes his young wife and sets up home not far from the family homestead. The second kid is sent out there with some servitors to fit up the old place to the ex-hangman's requirements. Kid works hard, fixes up this old house, even basically rebuilds this fallin-down chapel the old guy wanted to have use of and one day, just as he caps off the church and sends the servitors home finally this young wife comes out to have a look at what he's done. You boys can imagine what happened, I'm sure. The 'sar's wound seemed to mean that he couldn't be the husband she wanted, this young and energetic woman, and by contrast alone if nothin else this boy who had built this beautiful chapel seemed like the guy for her. They meet a couple more times, she riding out to meet him all over the place. The hangman finds out, of course, and the time he catches them, they're in the very chapel he had had made. He killed them. Both. The kid he shot in the head, the crippled and broken down ole man plain beatin this young kid to the draw. The women he beat with his hands. This kid I knew didn't know if he really meant to kill her or not, but she ended up dead all the same. The 'sar had brought a damned torch servitor with him and had the thing burn the the place to the ground, sacred to the Emperor or no, then had it drag the kid outside and branded the mark onto the kid's head, right there in the smoke and the flames. The wife he carries off himself and makes it look like suicide back home. Emperor alone knows how. Then he reports the thing to the Inquisition. But they take so damned long getting round to the place, out there on the Eastern Fringe an all, that the damned hangman is dead an buried in the ground by the time the ships come around.”

“So what happened?” Jongen asked, wide-eyed. “How come this kid's planet didn't get blown up?”

“That was the damndest thing of all,” Serra said, flicking the spent tube away. “The kid goes back to his world, gets all this out of his old man and they let the planet go! The kid turns this all in to the Inquisitor in charge of the op and they just turn right around and leave. No word of thanks, no judgements, they just up and go. Kid said that he could have taken it if there had been a cult in the family, what he couldn't get was not the horror at something horrible; the cult that never was, that he could deal with. What he had himself was a horror at the horror this old man felt, and the way he used and twisted the thing that we all rely on, that faith that keeps us all goin, at least through basic, even if some of us do lose a little along the way once we hit operations, the fact that this guy, the guardian and keeper of that thing was the one to use it was the thing he couldn't take, the horror at the horror. I growed up fast in the guard that day, I tell you.”

“But how did he find all this out?” Jongen asked. “I mean, how did the father know?”

The old man turned to look at him. He held his gaze a long time and then said

“The kid's old man helped. The hangman told him his uncle was in a filthy pact with the dark powers and that he and the girl were in it together and the father went with him to burn the chapel. Hell, the kid told me that the father held the smoking branding iron with that dark symbol on it to his dead uncle's forred hisself. Never knew about the report the old man had sent.”

The young one sat back, then crossed his arms across his chest, hugging himself against the chill in the old factory. The old one spat into the fire where the black spittle evaporated with a brief hiss.

Stancato leant forward and looked up at Serra through the smoke of the fire

“I guess that means that you hate the guard as much as I do.”

Serra leant forwards and looked at the ground for a long time. He muttered something.

“Pardon me?” asked Stancato.

“I said, no. I don't hate it. I dont. I really dont.”

Outside, the shells continued to fall, indifferent to the stories shared by the companions sheltering in the grey factory of war.

White


South from where the mountains thrust their black cliffs from out of the pure white of the fresh-fallen snow of altitude roll the endless snow-covered plains of the tundra. These alabaster reaches run on and on into a distance where the harsh glare of the snow-blind wastes fades to a bluish tint on the far horizon. For a hundred miles these barren regions run on and on, unbroken in their whiteness until, finally, dark on the horizon, a small clump of black and skeletal trees appears, their gnarled and angular limbs and bent and knotted trunks resembling nothing more than a desperate group of pilgrims, who, all but unaccountable in that place, had huddled together for warmth. It was in this sable and leafless copse that the men waited.

“Ice world”, the gunner said, clapping his hands together as he stamped the snow off his boots, walking around the back of the Basilisk's frozen tracks and into the crude and covered dugout behind which the men's simple tent had been pitched. Beneath his greatcoat he was a slight man, clean shaven under his ushanka, his body hard and muscular in the lean and dexterous manner of an acrobat. “I never really knew what that meant 'till they dumped us here.”

“Ah, you're just being soft,” said the loader. He was an older and heavier man, bareheaded with a shock of unkempt grey hair and full beard. The loader sat on an upturned shell-casing, holding his bare palms to the fire burning in an empty oil drum. “You should have been around for Malvarmo. Cold to strip your bones, that place was. Couldn't go outside at night, even. And we was stuck there crusadin for years.”

“Maybe,” the gunner said, sitting down heavily onto another upturned casing, “But how long have we been stuck here? I blame those Cadians out there who're organising this feth-show. Knew we were in trouble when the sarge took off with that last convoy. Guarding critical assets my frozen ass.”

The loader grunted. “About a week by my reckoning. Knew we was in trouble when the gaffer went off with that last group. Ain't my fault the blinkin' radio froze up, though, is it? You know what they say about those Cadians, they just hate leavin 'ome. Their gear too.”

“I hear that,” the gunner said, revealing a shaven head as he took off his hat and rubbing his hands over his eyes and then up over the top of his head as he spoke. “Good job we've got supplies for a month in there.” As he said this, he jabbed his thumb toward the tank, “But I'm as pissed as you are about being stuck out here. Where's the kid anyway? Didn't we send him out hours ago?”

Just as the gunner finished speaking a figure appeared scrambling down the snow-bank at the side of the dugout. Carrying a sodden armload of dark branches it tottered across the dugout and tossed the logs down next to the oil barrel in a clattering pile. “There's your fething wood,” the driver said. He was a younger man, soft-featured, wiry and ginger-haired.

“See anything out there, lad?” asked the gunner, smiling and turning to look at the younger man.

“Nothing,” said the driver. As he spoke he threw a few of the smaller limbs into the fire, then looked quizzically at one larger piece for a moment, before snapping it in half over his knee with an effort and throwing it in after the others. “Nothing except the same flat white glowin nothin I've been lookin at for the last fething week. Not even any smoke up on the mountains any more.”

The driver sat on a spent shell casing and looked up at the gun. The barrel was covered a in sparkling web of ice, so cold to the touch that it burned. Motes of ice tumbled through the freezing air, flashing as they caught the sunlight. They reminded the driver of home. “They're not coming back for us, are they?” he said, lowering his head into his folded arms and looking from one of his companions to the other.

The gunner smiled, “I wouldn't get worried yet, kid.”

“Yeah” said the loader. “I got stranded like this for about a month back on Dneiper. Wasn't until the rest of the crusade fleet was heading off-world that they thought to let us know that the war was over. There's about half a billion men fighting out there, kid. They've got other things on their minds right now. They'll let us know what's goin on when they're good and ready.”

“Wait, wait. You were on Dneiper?” the gunner laughed, turning to look at the gunner, “How long have you been in the guard, old man? Dneiper was thirty years ago.”

The loader looked at the gunner. “Comin up on forty years,” he said slowly. “Been an artilleryman all that time. Spent twice as much time away from home as I spent there, includin the time there doin basic. Doubt I'd know it if I went back there.”

The gunner whistled through his teeth. “Ever think about going back, old man? Get yourself pensioned out, find yourself a nice spread, family maybe?”

The loader watched the falling motes of ice for a moment, then looked back at the gunner, he opened his mouth to speak.

Buzzing above the tundra, the blight drone's twin rotors turned slightly as the malevolent intelligence bound within it detected something on the horizon. Its green and broken shell was crystalled and blackened with frostbite, its guns similarly covered with a sheen of ice. The drone swept around in a long turn as it approached the small cluster of dark trees. As the drone dropped lower a vent at its rear slowly opened, distended and poured out an oily black foulness, withering trees and melting through the suddenly-revealed barrel of the piece of field artillery hidden there. Suddenly the drone turned like a housefly and hovered for a few moments. The eye on the drone's front moved side to side, flickering, checking over the scene. Satisfied, the drone moved off, its buzzing slowly fading as it disappeared into the hazy blueness on the horizon of that endlessly white world.

As the sun dropped below the horizon, the winds howled across the snowfields. The falling ice crystals mixed together with the drifting snow raised up from permafrosted ground below. The roiling mass of black foulness sat like a vile and infected scab upon that bleached wilderness for a few hours, but as the wind cooled the supernatural ichor the bubbling slowed and eventually stopped as it eventually consumed the final broken and twisted limbs. Finally, the snow covered it all, and once again the plains were purely and unbrokenly white.

Haunting


“Come up to us, our children, for we are the dead.

When the final ringing of the last explosions had faded, the echoes of the last orders had ceased to reverberate, and the last of them had gone, had climbed into their screaming shuttles, had airlifted out the last of their soldiers, burned the last of the bodies, we, the survivors, came back.

We came out from the bunkers and the shelters and the hidden places we had been evacuated to while they unleashed a fire across the length and breadth of our world, while they ploughed up the farmlands, the streets, and the graves.

Come up to us, our children, for we are the dead.

We came out from our hiding places to find the ash falling from the sky. We came out to find the ash which would fall upon the living, and would fall upon the dead.

We came out to find the ash which would choke our lungs, and which covered the old roads we had used to find our way. The ash that filled the rivers we had once sailed upon. The ash which blotted out the sun like an endless and dreary snowfall, and which tasted bitter even through the masks and rebreathers we had found. The ash which had fallen upon the ash, which had fallen upon the ash, which had fallen upon the ash, which had fallen upon the ash. 

Come up to us, our children, for we are the dead.

Through the groves of blasted and skeletal and ancient trees we came at last to the plains upon which they had unleashed their fury. There we saw the crisscrossed networks of trenches, tracing out battle lines we could not understand, a new and unfamiliar map of roads overlaid onto the ones our ancestors had laid. 

It was there on the plains that we saw the great pyres they had made of the dead. There we saw the blackened and twisted remains of those who had fought in that place. And there we saw the charred bodies slowly turning to ash, a swirling grey silt to be blown around that cold and silent and indifferent plane for a thousand years to come. 

Come up to us, our children, for we are the dead.

As we crossed the plains, following no paths and no roads save those left to us in our dimming and distant memories of journeys taken in a time which seemed so distant as to belong to another people, native to another place.

Finally, our boots sighing through the small clouds of ash they threw up, our supplies all but exhausted and our old and our infirm almost at their end, we reached our cities. Here we found the great buildings fallen, leaning on each other like exhausted combatants. The elevated roads and rail lines lay broken and twisted, the steel skeletons of the felled skyscrapers crazed and rusting in the caustic and freezing winds. We scavenged what we could, and we moved onward.

Come up to us, our children, for we are the dead.

We left the cities, the formerly gleaming windows of the gargantuan buildings of that other time encrusted with ash seeming to watch us like old and blinded and spiteful eyes. We left the city, and there we left our wounded, and our infirm.

We, the few who remained, left the city and pressed on, Eastward, toward the seas. Following nothing, save for the faintest taste of salt in the air, following not even the pale rising of the sun which seemed to fade, day by day. We moved on, grey phantoms moving in that grey and greying world of ash blizzards and silence. 

Finally, we came to the sea. We beheld at last the grey and frothing expanse which stretched before us endlessly, out into the grey howling of the spiralling ash. We made fire, there, on the filthy beach, and we watched the dimmed tide come in as the pale sun set behind us. We looked, but we saw no other fires glinting back at us across that endless and undulating morass. 

Come up to us, our children, for we are the dead.

We turned back then, those of us who were left. We turned in a kind of terror from the grey leviathan stretching before us. We turned back toward the heart of the continent, into the wind which drove the drifting ash into out faces, clotting in our hair and filling our shoes. The ash of a thousand thousand funereal fires. The ash of dead.

We passed back through the city, stopping only to perform the necessary rites for our dead, their ascending ashes mingling with the burned remains of our world. We passed across the flattened and scarred wastelands of the plains, even the pyre-hills now flattened by the ceaseless howling of the driving gales. We could not, though, return to our bunkers and our hiding places. There was nothing left from which to hide.

Instead, we climbed. We climbed the ancient paths worn into the cliff-sides of the southern mesas. We climbed higher and higher up rock which had once been red and where the warrior-people of ages past had rode down to fight their enemies with spear and bow and axe. We climbed until we came at last to the ancient stone villages of our first ancestors. The dwellings cut into the very living rock of the world. Rock which had endured time beyond the knowledge of men, and which would endure that time again before it was finally and utterly claimed by the insistent and screaming winds which drive endlessly around the world.

We climbed there, and found the places where they had told their stories, where we found their stories cut also into the rocks themselves. The rocks which now came to speak to us, to tell us the stories carved there before, before, before. In those places, with the stories of our ancestors, we sat, and we waited, there. We waited while the sun set and the wind howled, driving the endless and enduring ash forever and forever and forever.

Come up to us, our children, for we are the dead. And we shall wait for you.” 

- Last testimony of the rogue pysker known as the “Oracle of Phocis”, sole survivor of the recolonizing mission on Pythos IV (Cross ref file: PythosCleansing995.M41) before her execution for heresy. A full investigation was undertaken, and the world was declared Perdita Extremis in 998.M41 when the explorator team failed to return.

Thought for the Day: A curious mind is an unbarred gate before the hordes of heresy. 

Love in a Time of Tithing

The girl and the boy lay on their backs and looked up at the stars. The fireflies swirled above them, tracing brief but brilliant tracks between the distant points of light. The woods were all around them, dark and deep. The pair had pitched their tent here in this clearing to watch the stars and to see the fireflies. The rented transporter stood some miles away at the edge of the forest. They were far enough from the hive to escape the clouds of smog. The boy lay with his fingers laced behind his shaven head. The ground was cool against his back despite the warmth of the night. The girl rolled on her side, leaning on hip and elbow and whispered to the boy, then rolled back and laughed as the boy first smiled, then laughed. Then they lay and watched the fireflies again.

~

They stood together on a metal footbridge, leaning their arms on the raised side rail between the double headed eagles. He on a break from guard duty at the precinct courthouse, she free from her studies among the curators. It was summer in the great hive city. The enormous spires of the administratum buildings loomed above them, their tips lost in the yellow summer haze. Huge numbers of shuttle craft flew lazily back and forth in thin black ribbons between the soaring peaks. Below the pair, the serried ranks of hooded workers tramped in ordered rows across a concourse over a mile above the planet's surface. Going about their business. They carried scrolls, papers, mysterious cogitator engines. Heads bowed. Not speaking. The day was hot. The girl had cropped her dark hair short and wore a vest in place of the standard long sleeved work shirt. Warm skin. Part-bared midriff. She shouted down gleefully at the flow of workers below. None raised their eyes. The pair turned, laughing, and sat with their backs against the warm metal of the side of the bridge. The boy took out a Lho stick and infantry issue lighter. He lit the stick and smoked. The girl took the paper tube from him neatly between two fingers. Her hand touching his. She took a pull on the smoking tube. Blew the smoke straight upward. He smiled and reached to take it back. She laughed and transferred the stick to the other hand, stretching it away from him, out of his reach. He leant across her, smiling. She looked up, smiling.

~ 

The night she came to see him, rang the bell at midnight. As summer became autumn. The nights colder. The mornings crisp. Higher up the hive the cold could take your breath. He pushed the door release, bleary eyed, heavy lidded. Hair askew, a shirt pulled hurriedly on over sleeping garments. The door slid open. She stood there, wide-eyed. Frightened. Wearing black pocketed cargo trousers and a thick and oversized woollen sweater. She had been crying. She placed a hand on his chest and pushed him inside. Firm. Insistent. She pushed the button to close the door. Showed him the fresh tattoo. On the underside of the wrist. Above the blue cables of the veins. The red, raw skin around the black tower and its lidless eye. The number. The eagle. He took her hands in his. Kissed the palms.

~

Leaving the hive. She in a sackcloth robe of his father's. Long sleeves to cover the arms. A hood to cover the face, the head. He in his off-duty clothes. A citizen. Yet identifiable. He held her close as they moved through the crowds. Counterflow. Like swimming upstream. Holding her close. Arbites who knew him let them pass. Nodding. One to another. The transport shuttle down. Miles down. To the surface. Not making eye contact with the other passengers. Nodding. Heads bowed. Not smiling. Not talking.

~

The woods again. The tent. But this time they had lingered in the borrowed transporter. Kneeling in the flat rear cargo space, the dome light casting its orange glow across them both. The blanket spread beneath them. Her hood now thrown back. Her sleeves rolled. They planned. They argued. The girl shouted. Pointed to her arm. Then to the hive city. Its black and spined immensity. The boy scratching the back of his head. Looking down. Holding the back of his neck in his hand. A sound in the forest. A snap. Both heads whipped round. Upturned faces in the weak light. Like children. Looking out at the dark. That night they did not watch the stars. And the fireflies had died. 

~ 

Her body. Two days later. Another camp. Another clearing. Lying on the sleeping mat. The face turned from the fire. The bruise thumbprint fresh on the pale neck. Below the ear. The coldness of the gun barrel against the back of his head as he stood there. The metal against his scalp. The order to kneel. The dampness of the ground on his knees. The question he asked her murderer.

~ 

These were the things which ran through his mind as he knelt there in the dark and the cold. His back to the fire. Facing out into the night. Those things and the answer to the question. High Gothic. Of course. Offworlder. He never saw the assassin's face. Never heard the shot. But the answer he heard.


Ego imperium voluntatis . Non est opus exponere .

The Mission

Private First Class Voorvechter was wet and he was hungry. In fact, he had been wet and hungry for about three weeks, ever since they had landed on this frelling jungle world and set off on this frelling deep-jungle Mission.

By now, two months into The Mission, with the supplies running out and the thunderbolts unable to reach them through the endless pouring rain the hunger was a deep hunger that gnawed at the guts and caused the hands to shake and the wetness was a sodden, bitter-tasting wetness which soaked into the men's boots and drenched their feet so the skin on the soles became a white and spongy mass which peeled off in the evenings with their socks. At first there had been animals, small birds and snakes and a kind of leech which had plagued the men, but as they travelled deeper into the forest and the rain continued to fall, even these creatures seemed to abandon them and they marched into a region of eerie silence, only the roar of the rain on the trees providing a ceaseless backdrop of noise to cover the squelching footsteps of the men.

Perhaps it was because of the hunger that Private Zelfmoord , his concentration shaken for just a moment on a grey and wet early morning watch duty did not check his target before he shot Sergeant Lijk through the back of the head while he crouched to take a dump.

And perhaps it because of the endless sheeting grey and chemical-tasting rain churning the ground into a grey-brown slurry that Private Verkenner, the company's grizzled and veteran scout and sniper tripped one of the traps left by their invisible and seemingly absent enemy, sending him flying high into the air in what looked a slow and elegant arc until he came suddenly to rest in a broken-necked and one-legged heap between the roots of a tree.

The Mission, as had been made clear to them by Commissar Slachthuis, was to find a lightning fighter which had, whilst carrying some of the most vital of The Emperor's Most Sacred Orders, found His protection momentarily lacking and crashed somewhere in the jungle covering eight tenths of the planet Moeras. To what the orders referred was not of concern to the soldiers of Alpha company, only that they had been lost almost two weeks before the beginning of the Mission and that it was vital that they did not fall into enemy hands.

“I bet it's Colonel Bevelhebber's drinks tab from the officer's club”, Sergeant Lijk had said one evening, before he had been shot taking a dump, as they sat around a campfire made of cracked and sputtering signal flares, the wood being too soaked through to cut, let alone burn, coming apart in the men's hands like sponge. Private Zelfmoord had laughed. They had been friends, Zelfmoord and Lijk, all the way since the academy, so Zelfmoord had probably not meant to shoot Lijk through the back of the head. Probably. Colonel Bevelhebber had, of course, remained at the rear in the cavernous, well-stocked and most of all dry command and control centre. It was for this reason that the Extended Jungle Patrol had been placed under the command of Commissar Slachthuis, a man who, while he lacked the Colonel's offensively rounded belly and drinkers cheeks, also lacked the basic empathy which made the Colonel popular amongst the men.

It helped to joke about the Mission, of course. The alternative was to look at the Mission for what it was; a slow, agonising slog through the mud and the filth and the rain to find a thunderbolt perhaps 14 meters long in a jungle the size of a continent that the enemy, or, equally possibly, the Imperium which had sent them on the Mission, had booby trapped with tens of thousands of land mines, trip wires, and other, more terrible and ingenious traps and pitfalls.

Two days short of three months into the Mission, about a week after Sergeant Lijk had been shot by Private Zelfmoord, just as the men began to looked gaunted, their cheekbones showing through the grey fuzz of their beards, and against all the odds, they found the thunderbolt. The scouts approached cautiously, probing for booby traps, while the rest of Alpha company sat around the crash site, huddled under tarpaulins and wrapped in standard-issue ponchos which had long ago ceased to be truly waterproof.

As the light began to fail one of the scouts called out. The men of Alpha company, some of whom had begun to doze, seated with their heads bowed, water cascading over their flak helmets into their laps, snapped to attention, scattering great plumes of dirty water as they did so. Two scouts appeared, one supporting a man with an arm over his shoulder, the other carrying a sodden and unidentifiable mass wrapped in a grey flight-crew tarp. Commissar Slachthuis stepped forward and the crewman was dropped in a grey puddle at his feet, sinking to his knees as soon as the scout released him, an abject and skeletally-thin and soaking supplicant before the Imperium's representative. The bundle was dropped next to him. All that could be heard by the men of Alpha company was the hammering of the rain on the treetops above them as the Commissar spoke to the man, who held up like a sacred offering the sealed and watertight shoulder-satchel containing the orders the men of Alpha company had been subjected to this mire to seek out.

One of the scouts said something to the Commissar and flipped open part of the bundle. Slachthuis glanced at the bundle, then straightened and said something to the crewmen kneeling before him before drawing his heavy pistol from his belt, holding it against the man's forehead and pulling the trigger, sending a spurt of bright red gore out of the back of the man's head to mingle with the grey-brown of the mud. The report of the pistol echoed. The man did not even fall. He simply slouched forward, looking totally defeated.

As Alpha company reversed direction to rendezvous with an airbourne pickup some scores of miles distant, Private First Class Voorvechter fell into step with the scout who had opened the bundle and asked him what had been in it. The scout looked at Voorvechter for a long time before he said, simply and without great emotion, “His pilot. Missing his arms and legs.” Then Private First Class Voorvechter understood.

These are all really great so far. Thanks for sharing your work.

I've enjoyed the first two and I'm anticipating enjoying "Haunting" too. I just started it but already i can tell from it's lyrical style that it is going to be a treat.

Great visuals. Loved the giant Aquila squashing the commissar, I could see that in a web comic illustration. And the themes you're working with, of life and death and finding meaning in between. Stories of times that matter and people that meant something who in the end don't really matter of mean a whole lot. Or do they, did they or don't they?

Anyway, just thought I'd chime in now while I'm halfway though. Thanks again.

Thanks, man. It's always nice to get feedback, especially such nice feedback! Hope you enjoyed the rest as much as you did the first half.

More is coming, once I'm clear of a few other deadlines.

Pretty grim those last two. Nice to see love get a little treatment in the old grimdark universe. Didn't last long but you know, the imperium isn't about hugs and high-fives. But it would be pointless to deny that love is part of human nature no matter how counterproductive it is for the imperium.

Nice work again. Thanks for sharing.