“You shoulda seen it boss! You were as graceful as an ork when you went headfirst into the mud.” Mason said with a chuckle. He slammed one hand into the other and blew a raspberry when they connected before he had himself a small laughing fit.
They sat in the wreck of a building that Cally had spotted when they’d made their escape. It was easy to see why the building wasn’t in use by the PDF. The walls were rotted, all the pressure seals had corroded into nothing, the windows had broken and at some point a six inch deep layer of mud and God-Emperor knows what else had seeped up through the cracked floor.
Corr rolled his eyes and winced as Briggs poked at his calf.
“Shut up, Mason.” He hissed as Briggs drew a metal sliver the length of her finger from the meat of his calf.
“I’m no medic, but this probably doesn’t belong there.” She said, holding up the shrapnel to look it over.
“We can’t sit still. We gotta get gone.” Corr said as he tore off his sleeve and wrapped it tightly around his calf. He glared at their prisoner. “What the quickest route to the capital?”
“I can’t. I w-won’t betray my governor to pirate scum like you.” He stammered. Stakely stood behind him, knife in hand, almost visibly begging to cut the man’s throat and let him bleed out.
“Yes you will.” Corr said as he stood up, testing his weight on his leg and finding it tolerable. He trudged over to Nelis and grabbed him by his flak armor to pull him close. “You’ll tell me whatever I want to know. Or I will break every bone in your body in ways they won’t heal. And I will do it slowly, a single bone at a time, until I no longer find it amusing.”
Nelis blanched; his skin unhealthy and pallid beneath his breather.
“No, I take that back. I won’t stop until Stakely no longer finds it amusing.” Stakely let out a harsh laugh and their prisoner began to tremble. He jerked his head to the right and looked down at the filthy muck around his boots.
“If… if you cut straight through the swamp you’ll get there quicker than if you take any of the roads.” He said shamefully. “Don’t let that psycho near me.”
“Good man.” Corr said, letting him go. “We need to move. The whole garrison is on alert and we-”
“Shh!” Briggs snapped, her rifle coming up in an instant. Everyone dropped low and hid in the shadows. Stakley grabbed their guide and pressed his knife to his neck before forcing him down to the ground, his face in the mud.
“Not a peep.” He whispered.
After a long moment a group of ten PDF troopers came cutting through alley outside, rifles in hand. Corr laid still, hand on his pistol, as the troopers marched through. It wasn’t long before they’d passed and Corr tentatively poked his head up.
“We need to be gone. Now.” He said as he climbed out of the filth. As if to punctuate his words there came a loud boom from above that lingered for long moments.
“What the frak?” Cally asked, looking up at the sky from a grimy broken-out window.
“It’s… it’s gonna storm.” Nelis said.
“Is that bad?” Mason asked. Nelis shrugged.
“Not if you really like water. It’ll rain for weeks straight in this area. It’s why this settlement was abandoned; they couldn’t deal with the flood waters.”
As if on cue, fat droplets began to fall from the sky.
“The bad weather will help cover our tracks. But we need to move.” Corr said, as he slung his lasgun. They quickly and quietly left their temporary lodgings and made their way into the swamp at a quick pace, dragging along their guest.


Nelis hadn’t been lying. It had been raining for three solid hours and showed no signs of letting up. Traversing the swamp was getting more dangerous by the minute as what was once a thick mud was now a soupy mess. Twice now Mason had managed to disappear beneath the brackish mire only to reemerge several meters away, swearing up a storm and thrashing like an injured fish. It soon became clear to stay next to the gnarled trees, as their roots formed a decent footing. Well, at least somewhat decent.
Corr despised this planet already. He was soaked. He completely regretted tearing off his sleeve to bind his injured calf, which was probably garnering a horrid infection from spending the last two hours submerged in the swamp on a toxic world.
“I have a sneaking suspicion I’m going to lose my leg.” Corr muttered into the vox. He grabbed a nearby branch and hauled himself out of the muck for a moment and looked back at his calf.
“Think of the shiny new prosthetic you’ll get if you don’t die, Sarge!” Stakely said, barely able to control his laugh.
“Right… ‘shiny’ and ‘new’ describes all our equipment.” Mason chortled. Stakely rolled his eyes.
“Awright, awright. So he gets a crap one. He can always steal something better.” Callahan said as he climbed up one of the twisted trees and leaned back against the branches, looking around for a sign of civilization.
“Somehow… all this is still not comforting.” Corr hissed.
“Bloody pirate scum…”
“Already told you, Nelis. We aren’t pirates. We’re Imperial Guard.” Briggs said as she grabbed a branch and pulled herself through the mire. Nelis nodded his head.
“Oh yes. I’m sure. Imperial Guard, sent to stop us awful rebels.” He struggled through the swamp as he spoke, very nearly falling several times.
“Sarge, should we untie him?” Mason asked. “He’d be able to keep up better.”
“He’d also be able to run off better.” Briggs hissed.
“No, he stays tied for now. We can’t have him warning anyone we’re here. We have a time table to meet.” Corr said as he grabbed Nelis by the collar and hauled him out of the muck. “Tell me that we’re getting close.”
Nelis looked around briefly and then nodded to his right.
“The road… it should be about a kilometer in that direction as it circles back towards the capital. The Governor’s mansion is in the middle of the capital.” He then jerked his head in the direction they’d been heading. “If not for the storm we’d probably be seeing the mansion towers already.”
“Surrounded by twenty thousand of the finest PDF troopers this mudball has…” Callahan said with a chuckle.
“No.” Nelis said, “One hundred thousand.”
Corr felt a nagging sense of doubt as it began to claw at the fringes of his mind. Five Chem-Dogs against one hundred thousand planetary defense troopers.
“Well…” Mason muttered, “Least we won’t be lonesome.”

It was another hour of slogging through the mud before they came to anything resembling civilization. It started as a brick path that rose up out of the mire. Then it was a brick path that sprouted poorly maintained huts. The group froze as the took in a skyway some kilometer up, that the slums had cropped up underneath, rising up the support struts towards like lichen growing up the trunk of a tree.
“Home, sweet home.” Nelis said. Corr looked at him, expecting a look of disgust or contempt for their surroundings, but found none. He gripped the man’s uniform and pulled him aside between two of the huts, pulled out his combat knife, and pointed it at his throat as the rest of the team came closer.
“Now you listen. I’m gonna cut your binds. You stay with us, and you stay quiet. If you break our cover, I will end you before they take me down. Understand?” Nelis’s eyes were locked on the knife, but he managed a weak nod. Corr sighed and sliced clean through Nelis’s binds. He shook out his hands and rubbed at his wrists. “Which way do we go if we need to remain hidden?”
“Well… if we stay here you’ll be safe. The arbitrators are almost never down here, let alone the PDF. But, since you need to get to the mansion, we’ll have to cut through the city. And… well… we look like deserters.” Nelis answered, gesturing at the state of our pilfered uniforms. The thick, dark mud still clung to the fabric, despite the deluge of rain that fell from the sky. Mason frowned and wiped at the mud that covered him from head to toe nervously.
“Not my fault… Briggs splashed me.” He muttered. Briggs lowered her head into the palm of her hand and muttered angrily to herself.
“I’m going to kill him, Serevin. I swear it.”
“Right, so we just need to clean up a bit, make ourselves presentable to the Governor, and then blow up his house. I like this plan.” Stakely said as he peered through the window of one of the huts.
“It… it won’t be that simple. He’s barricaded himself in the mansion with his palatial guard. The PDF are the first line of defense, the fortifications the second, and the palatial guard the last.” Nelis added.
“He seems awfully paranoid considering he shouldn’t know we’re coming for him in particular.” Briggs said.
“That’s… well… now that you mention it, he started this about a year ago.” Nelis said quietly. “He… he called an emergency conference with his advisors and the PDF generals. It was shortly thereafter that we were mobilized. We started building fortifications around his mansion and the main city thoroughfares. Then he ordered organized patrols to the abandoned settlements. And then he set up temporary outposts in those abandoned settlements.”
“Like where we found you?” Callahan said. Nelis nodded.
“Something is off. We only got our orders a couple weeks ago.” Corr said. He leaned against the hut for a moment and looked down at the mud in thought. “We were told that there was a munitions stockpile on the mansion grounds. Where is it?”
“Uhh… there’s a bunker at the rear of his estate. He and the Generals had all major ammunition for the PDF in the city moved there. But that bunker is older than the city and its virtually impenetrable.” Nelis muttered.
“We need those munitions. So we’ll need a way inside.” Stakely said as he toyed with his combat knife.
“Impossible. It’d take days of Earthshaker bombardment to get through it.” Corr looked up. Even with a breather obscuring his face, it was clear that he was grinning.
“Then we’ll just have to find someone with the keys, won’t we?”