Fresh-Faced New User
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Duty
The creature swept in close along the mountainside, turning in the heavy evening air so that its lean belly was presented to the cliff. From where he sat, Alchion Vex marvelled as it slid bare meters from the jagged brown outcroppings, twisting nonchalantly to avoid rocks and tree roots. It beat long, leathery wings and gained altitude on rising heat from the forest below as the light faded to grey. Targeting runes and vector lines appeared on his helm display. He blink-clicked them away. Something caught the creature’s attention then, and even his transhuman eyes struggled to keep pace as it plummeted out of sight into the gloom of the valley below.
His attention switched to his surroundings, seeking movement amongst the tall bottle green foliage carpeting the hillside. His view was limited; a hundred meters or so from where he sat the curving mountainside turned shear and dropped suddenly to the valley floor a near half kilometre below. Vex watched the planet’s twin stars slide across the heavens, the smaller lagging behind the larger like a reluctant sibling. The moon’s sky would never be entirely black, not with two suns in the heavens and planet rise not much more than an hour after their descent beyond the horizon, and now it blazed orange like a ripe fruit.
He flicked his eyes to the upper right portion of his helmet display and saw red seconds tick down past the thirty-minute mark. The secure channel crackled quietly in his ear.
“Final charges active. Commencing withdrawal.”
A small, giddy adrenaline rush like an electric charge surged through him at the thought of the mission’s imminent completion, and he grinned. The feeling had never left him; that wonderous sensation of anticipation. The thought guided his eyes towards the vast wall of dappled grey rockcrete on his right and the many millions of tons of water that were held at bay there by Adeptus Mechanicus engineering.
In the valley below Vex watched lights flicker into life like a thousand fireflies waking up. Seconds fell past, turning into minutes. He scoured the shadows dutifully, watching for signs, but when they came, it was his hearing that alerted him to the danger.
The slope above him had yet to disappear entirely into darkness. At its top ran an overgrown trail, winding its way along the ridge towards a road that lay across the dam. From there, he could hear movement. A clink of metal on metal; a buckle on an ammunition belt perhaps, or the butt of a lasgun knocking against a water canteen.
It was unfortunate, but he was where he was for precisely this eventuality. He transmitted a short set of clicks across the secured Vox network. He received a single click of acknowledgement.
A slight turn of his head, and he could see two figures descending through the undergrowth of the slope towards him. They wore standard pattern Imperial flak armour, their lasrifles slung across their backs. A male and a female. They were both tall, stretched beyond standard human dimensions over generations by the moon’s low gravity. In some ways, Vex was reminded of the Aeldari.
It might be the end of a patrol cycle, he thought. Their actions were sloppy in a way they shouldn’t have been. Perhaps the act of separatism that their planetary council had perpetrated had already begun to erode discipline. Above the descending pair, the brief sight of three more troopers keeping to the trail. Vex turned his head slowly back, allowing the cameleoline cloak he wore to settle across his helmet. Auspex returns pinged softly.
They were not quiet. Muffled curses accompanied the sound of snapping twigs and the shuffle of ferns being displaced. The three on the trail disappeared.
Vex breathed deeply, setting himself. His teachers in the Chapter told him preparedness would become more instinctive over time, but with fewer than two dozen actions on his record he still favoured a few moments of mental anticipation before battle.
The male, larger and taller than the female, lead the way as they came closer. Vex wondered if there was a lower trail below where he sat that they were making for. In his left hand he tightened his grip on his combat knife, while his right index finger slid into position close to the trigger of his gun. It was a Stalker pattern variant of the standard Boltgun, equipped with suppressors and subsonic rounds for exactly this type of work. It would not be entirely silent however, and the noise of its use would be noticed. He would need to be swift.
“How do you think this thing is going to go?” asked the female. Her voice was light, but there was a tension there brought on by weariness and stress.
“What thing?”
“The new government, you idiot.”
“It’ll be all over soon. There’s an Imperial warfleet sitting above us. They won’t back down. When did the Imperium ever do that?”
“We’re all dead then.”
“Nah, we’ll be fine. We’re PDF. Small cogs. Too small to worry about, certainly, and this place is too valuable for them to just blast us from orbit.” Vex could hear the shrug in his voice.
“You think?”
“I do. We’re on a stable warp corridor, you see. The Administratum base for the system is here, and who wants disruption to all that mining the Mechanicus does in the outer system gas giants? You know how much those gasses are worth to their forges?”
The female breathed out. “I suppose if you put it like that… I’m just a bit worried. I haven’t seen my family since all this started.”
The man turned to her. They were so close to Vex now that he could have stretched out and touched them.
“You and I are out here in the middle of nowhere guarding a dam, for feth’s sake. The PDF commanders will turn on the separatist leadership before long, you mark my words. They’re not as stupid as they make out. ‘Taking back control from the Imperium...’ Yeah, well ideals are all well and good until you’re staring down the barrel of a Leman Russ battle tank. There’ll be some public executions and it’ll all be over before the end of the week.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, though she didn’t sound convinced.
“Of course I am. We were lied to, after all. And these negotiations that are supposed to be going on are a smokescreen. It’s like a final warning before the shells get loaded and the lascannons are primed. It’ll be sorted out in the next few days. We’ll get stuck in a re-education camp for a month or so, and by the time we come out, we’ll all be good citizens again.”
The woman said nothing this time, so the man stopped and turned back to her. He was standing next to Vex.
“Trust me, it’ll be fine. I need to drain myself. You’re welcome to watch if you want.”
She snorted. “I’m not watching you wave that tiny thing around.”
The man laughed, and they turned simultaneously away from each other. The man fiddled with his trousers and began to urinate onto the cameleoline cloak covering Alchion Vex. He glanced down and frowned as the material shifted under the stream of his piss.
“What the…”
Vex’s armoured arm emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Before the trooper could react, the blade clutched by that armoured hand had plunged into his chest, puncturing his sternum and penetrating a lung. The man dropped, shock forever written on his face, and Vex allowed the body to drag his arm down. As he rose the cloak fell away and his right arm swung up, fluid motion like the flow of a river. He fired as it came level with the target, and the woman fell like a marionette with its strings cut, never seeing her killer.
The low, flat cough of the stalker round brought startled silence in its wake. Vex twisted and tugged at the knife, and before the dead man had hit the ground, he was moving up the slope. The seconds displayed in his helmet ticked on, uncaring.
The trail at the top of the ridge was bordered by tall ferns, and as Vex burst through them, he saw that the remaining troopers had walked further along it that he thought they might have done. He made a mental note to amend his planning in future as he ran on. Targeting runes flared red across his vision, and he dropped to one knee, raising the bolter in two hands. The men turned at the noise behind them, their expressions variations of shocked terror.
Vex didn’t hesitate. Three shots left the boltgun in rapid succession. Two struck true, and two figures crashed into the foliage. The third fell before the bolt found its proper mark, the trooper tripping himself up with an ill executed turn away from the sudden threat. His arm flew skywards in a puff of blood and he sprawled to the ground beside his dead comrades.
Vex walked over to the remains of the patrol. Two dead, and one whose arm would never work properly again, even if what was about to happen were not. He shook his head in private disgust. Chance had caused that final shot to miss, he thought, though that in itself was not an acceptable excuse.
The man on the ground was white with fear and shock. His shoulder was a tangled wreck of burst flesh, his chest awash with blood pumping darkly across it into the dirt, and his face was speckled crimson in stark contrast to his pale skin. Vex’s shadow encompassed the man entirely as he stood over the trooper. The hum of his armour was barely audible in the quiet. He raised the knife.
“Why?” the man asked. His breathing was already shallow.
Vex cocked his head to one side. All the answers he had felt suddenly inadequate, and none of them would make sense to the dying man, even if there were time to explain them. None of them would be enough, but the man deserved an answer of some sort at least.
“Duty,” he said. The knife descended.
He stood there a minute longer, listening for further sounds of disturbance. Yet part of his mind was working at the trooper’s last word. An obvious question to ask, in many ways, yet one whose single word answer was both everything and nothing at once.
Vex hid the bodies and lasguns deep in the undergrowth, kicking dust over the bloodstains on the earth, though there was no reason to believe anyone would miss the patrol until it was too late. He resumed his vigil in the same spot as before, throwing his cloak about him again, wrinkling his nose at the smell of urine. He transmitted a couple of short clicks via the secure Vox channel. Again, a single click came back in response.
There were only minutes remaining now, and no further threat warnings came. Birdsong resumed in the heights of the trees. Vex watched the final seconds tick away. The counter flashed a couple of times as the numbers hit zero before fading away.
For the briefest of seconds, he thought something had gone awry. A misfiring charge, or a patrol discovering the wreckage of the control room in the dam, or even the discovery of another of the strike team, just as he had been discovered not ten minutes previous. A quick shot raising the alarm, warning the separatists that something was amiss. Vex felt his skin prickle ever so slightly. It wasn’t fear. Not in a physical sense, and not for the welfare of him or his brothers, but a fear of failure.
Then there was a dull explosion, followed by several more, like firecrackers going off in series.
Vex leaned forward so he could see more of grey structure on his right, his eyes scanning back and forth for the tell-tale cracks in the rockcrete.
It started beneath his feet. The rocks trembled, and the ground shifted back and forth. He watched pebbles bounce around and saw the tall fronds shake unnaturally. It was a disconcerting experience, even for one such as him. Vex braced himself, grasping at a tree trunk while dirt streamed past downhill. The accompanying roar was feeling more than sound.
There had been two targets. The dams control room had been wrecked beyond repair when the Space Marines had taken it two days ago, preventing control of the water flow down the slipway. Since then they had worked internally, weakening the structure with Melta beams and setting mines in strategic locations.
Vex searched the grey face of the dam, his enhanced vision picking out the cracks and the seeping water from the breaches they had caused. The cracks widened as he watched, rockcrete tumbling in great chunks into the valley below as pressure built upon the weakness. Seconds ticked by, though he marked them mentally; the counter on his helm display was gone.
The section along the slipway gave then as the millions of tons of water held back by the ancient structure sought the path of least resistance. Rockcrete crashed away in freefall, water gushing out in torrents, flowing faster and faster as the dam weakened and split. Spray impacted on the valley floor, the rising mist reaching as high as Vex’s position on the mountainside.
In the valley a river formed, the water chasing itself down the incline towards the town nestled at the foot of the canyon. By the time it got there it would be an unstoppable flood.
He sat back and watched the lights in the buildings below. The people there would have heard the rumblings, would even now be casting anxious eyes up the valley. Running would not save them from the onrushing cataclysm. It was unfortunate, but it was what had been required of them.
Vex used his armours magnifying capabilities to focus in on a nondescript building on the near side of the small town. Night vision sensors coated his sight, while infrared filters showed him the residual heat from the buildings power source in a dull, fading orange. All their planning and preparation had centred on that structure as a target. In it, forgotten by all but the library curators on the Shade Reivers homeworld, were the ancient cogitators that kept the moons void shields active. The same void shields currently protecting the separatist capital and its defensive bastions. Without the shields, orbital lance strikes would pick them apart in a matter of hours.
They would not be needed. The trooper Vex killed had been right. The moon was too valuable to simply destroy over a matter of ideology, and the separatists would collapse within the day, either because of a counter coup as the PDF commanders sought to displace blame, or due to the Astra Militarum strike forces even now falling planetward from the warships in the void.
But a message had to be sent, to the separatists and the people of the moon itself. The Imperium would not be defied, and the people in the town below were the sacrifice demanded.
The first lights were going out as the flood waters crashed into the outskirts of the town, electrical lumens blowing out into darkness. Vex could hear nothing but the roar of water as the dam continued to give way, but he could image the panic, the screams, the terror as the reality of what was upon them became apparent.
He wondered whether it had really been necessary.
The cogitator building was one of the first to go, flooded and rendered inoperable. The water pushed in through every way it could, blowing conduits and capacitors before drowning them all. A brief flash spoke of a small explosion inside, before the building was subsumed by water.
Moments later the first glow of a lance strike lit the heavens. Miles away beyond the hills, something solid vanished into nothingness. A second and a third followed it in lazy succession. Vex sat back and transmitted the series of Vox clicks indicating their mission was complete. He received one in return.
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