Fresh-Faced New User
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Paper Heart
Jerrett can see Vos Drugath through the fog. Less than twenty yards away his old friend is leaning out from behind a lichen covered headstone, his face a pale contrast against the pitted rock and grey Planetary Defence Force helmet jammed tight onto his head. Vos sees him, and winks. Jerrett nods, and wipes sweat away from his face. He has always called him by the abbreviated part of his surname for all the time they have known each other. Now he thinks of it, he can’t recall ever having used his friend's given name.
Their company is deployed as part of the secondary line behind the lascannon and stubber teams at the cemetery wall, in amongst the towering gravestones and sepulchres of the cities great and good. Their advance during the pre-dawn hours had been rapid and unopposed; a plug to fill a late realised gap in the Imperial lines. Yet their success was relative, as though there had been no sight of the enemy, there had also not been any sign of reinforcements.
As they had settled into position darkness turned slowly into light while fog rising from the river had smothered conversation and chilled the bones. Jerrett knew enough to realise it was a fragile balance. The firing lines they had set up were now obscured, and nothing but the call of birds rose from the far side of the wall, thin, reedy, and hidden.
Jerrett shifts position and brushes at the grass surrounding the headstone. Despite the cold, his tunic is soaked with sweat beneath his armour, and the dampness makes him suddenly aware of the gaps between the flak plates.
There are cries in the mist now, occasional at first, mixed in with guttural shouts, and, Throne help them, answering screams. They have all seen the grainy picts of green skinned giants with red eyes and clawed hands. Xenos set only upon the kill. For weeks the planetwide information networks have plaintively asked why? into the wide blue of the sky and received no answer. At least, no answer that men shivering in the shadow of other, dead men can fathom.
His knuckles grow white on the lasgun while around him expressions become taut as jaws clench and eyes widen. They know what is coming. Vos raises his hand, his fist clenched. Jerrett responds in kind, though he feels none of the bravado the action represents. When the mist moves sluggishly aside, he can see the sheen of sweat on his friend’s face.
There are whispers now amongst the sergeants, as captains and lieutenants pass along information coming through the segregated vox channels used by the officers. Orders are relayed, confirmations sought, and then, in their section and among others, the officers look up as if to see the arced trajectory of what is coming.
“Incoming!”
Whistles, then. Faint until screamingly loud. Men duck down, crouching behind anything bigger than they are, behind anything at all. Concussions rock the ground. Dirt and debris are kicked up and flung into the sky. The artillery is their own, but none of them trusts the gunnery sergeants at that moment. The impacts reverberate, jarring teeth and shredding nerves. The noise is beyond anything they have ever heard; tinnitus comes in its wake. They pray to the God-Emperor that what lands on them is only dirt, but there are splashes of wetness too, and the men further back hear close screams as a shell lands short and a section of the wall disappears into dust, along with the squad stationed there.
Shouts for medics ring out, and answering them come roars from beyond the wall. Men scramble forward and rush back. Screams pick at the nerves as the wounded are tended to.
The barrage stops.
“Eyes front, you lot. Eyes front. Pick your targets.” The call comes from a sergeant threading his way through their section. The mantra is repeated along the line, echoing strangely amongst the gravestones and fog.
“Pick your targets?” says Vos. His grin is sickly. “He’s fethin’ joking, isn’t he? Can’t see my hand in front of my face here.”
“Shut up. Watch the front.”
Sounds again, like a thousand drumbeats out of step. In amongst them, only heard when the marching feet miss a beat, comes what sounds like… laughter. The noise becomes oppressive without visual confirmation. Auspex readings return trailing ghost images like visible winds, adding to the disorientation they all feel. None of them knows if the enemy is behind them or in front of them. Someone says exactly that, and is silenced by a muffled thump. Better that than have the commissar identify who said it.
Jerrett shoulders his weapon and holds his finger away from the trigger as he has been taught. He stares at it for long moments, willing it to stop trembling. The shells might have delayed the Orks, but that is all they will do. Perhaps the Imperial commanders realised the xenos were too close to the PDF lines for an effective bombardment. Perhaps that brief roar of defiance was all they could muster.
Jerrett and Vos look at each other wordlessly. Then the guns open up.
The first Orks charge the perimeter, shouting wordless battle cries. Stubbers blaze and lasgun flashes illuminate the mist. Bolters rattle in response. Chunks of stone explode from the perimeter wall and the slanted headstones behind them. The men duck in response to the gunfire, then glance around their barricades.
Directly in front of them, two men at the wall crumple backwards. An explosion tears a hole through the stone, and Jerrett sees the first of the Orks. It is huge, a looming nightmare partly hidden by fog and lit by the intermittent flash of lasbeams. Filthy, its skin an indistinct greenish grey in the muted light, it charges forward, and the yellow of its tusks and the rust of its crude armour is forgotten as the reality of it fills his sight. The cleaver it hefts in its hand is also crude, but when it crushes the chest of a trooper scrambling out of its way, it is deathly effective. It bellows wordless hate and sprays bullets over the wall, directly into the second line of Imperial defence. Another man goes down, and as the Orks ammunition runs out, more arrive at the breach.
“Move your arses!”
The sergeant stands over them and they scramble up, filling the air with shafts of searing light. Three ruby red beams transfix the Ork, and as it staggers backwards, they fire again. Not every shot hits. The Ork doesn’t fall. It rights itself and comes at them again, frothing blood between its teeth that looks black in the dim light. Only the sergeant isn’t panicking now.
There isn’t any blood from the alien’s wounds. Jerrett realises dimly that the lasbeams will have cauterised the injuries they have inflicted. The thought seems to come from outside his head, as if someone else is having it. He moves, he reacts, he fires his weapon, but at the same time none of it is him.
The Ork rears up before him. It shoves Vos aside with the shattered stump of an arm. He falls and his helmet tumbles away into the fog. Jerrett fires upwards, and the discharge sears away half of the Ork’s face. Time lengthens as an alien eye boils in its socket. He can see the steam coming from it. The sergeant charges the creature, impaling it with a bayonet affixed to the end of his lasgun. The weapon sticks in the xenos flesh, and before the sergeant can release it, the Ork brings its cleaver down on the man’s head. Though the blow is deflected by the curve of his helmet, his neck breaks and the cleaver carves into the man’s shoulder, separating it and his arm from his body. He falls wordlessly, a marionette with its strings cut. But it is enough. Even Orks can only take so much punishment. The creature falls forward, pinning Jerrett to the ground.
He can’t breathe. The alien’s dead face is beside his own, a leering and gap toothed thing from the darkest corners of his imagination. Its remaining eye is still open, and Jerrett imagines that it is not really dead, but resting. Just gathering itself for a few moments before lurching forward and tearing his face off with those fetid tusks. He begins to scream.
The Orks are at the perimeter no longer in ones and twos, but in squad strength. The fire line at the cemetery wall stands to meet them, holds for a minute, then buckles under the weight of the attackers and disintegrates. The secondary line comes under immediate pressure.Las beams materialize; stubbers clatter, and nothing is heard beyond the din of combat; shouts, screams, battle cries, cracks and the thump of explosions. Smokes drifts in amongst the gravestones and mixes with the fog to create a thick atmosphere of discharge.
Jerrett has lost his voice, and his cries have become tiny whimpers in the back of his throat. He struggles from beneath the fallen alien, wriggling and pushing and twisting until he can get the weight of it off him. He can’t breathe. His hearing is dulled – everything is just low concussions felt in his bones as much as heard through his ears. The sensations are overwhelming. Noise. Flashes of light. The stench of blood and gak and smoke and foul things he can’t put a name to. He stumbles, jarring his knee against something large and heavy on the ground. He can’t make out what the lump is, but he thinks it might be another dead alien. He feels only numbness.
Vos appears like a bloodied apparition out of the smoke. His uniform is filthy, though he still has his mud splattered lasgun. He looks at Jerrett without recognition, before turning and shooting blindly in the direction of the enemy. His lips are drawn back and he snarls at nothing, firing at movement and shadows as if possessed.
Jerrett turns and staggers back into the broken PDF lines, flinching at sudden noises, wondering where his weapon is. The Orks are in amongst them now, carving a bloody swathe, and all is a confusing mass of aural and visionary sensation, too quick for his mind to process.
Something heavy knocks him to the ground, rising over him like the encroaching shadow of death itself. Vos is there, still firing, hitting nothing. The Ork swipes him nearly in two with something large and heavy and already covered in some other poor bastard’s innards. Vos flops to the ground, arterial blood pumping into the grass. Jerrett swears that for a moment, even mostly bisected, he can still see life in his friend’s eyes. He feels wetness in his groin and the creature roars. His last conscious act before his mind retreats is to scramble to his feet and run, through wisps of slowly evaporating fog and thicker tendrils of smoke, until his legs give out, and he collapses.
* * * * *
They find him in a shallow foxhole, behind a slab of masonry that had been blown from the side of a building by artillery fire. Rough hands drag him out of the shadows and haul him to his feet. He does not resist.
The lieutenant leading them speaks to him but Jerrett can’t understand what he is saying, can’t think quickly enough to form a response. He stares slack mouthed until the man shakes his head and walks off.
There is a yellowish glow of daylight under sullen clouds. It is quiet now, the dull crump of munitions sparse and distant. Men move back and forth across a broken urban landscape, intent on individual tasks. Jerrett doesn’t know where they are in the city, but it is certainly nowhere near the cemetery.
The soldiers march him past the shattered ruins of hab units and warehouses. He stumbles often, but they didn’t seem to mind. The road they walk on is uneven, covered in debris from partially destroyed buildings. Jerrett looks at them without emotion. He looks at the soldiers escorting him in the same way. Dressed as he is, they wear hollowed out expressions, their faces pale beneath the dirt. They are not bred for this any more than he is, but they have become just the same as millions upon millions of others across the galaxy, handed a lasgun and shoved into the furnaces of the Imperium’s eternal wars.
“Another traitor comes,” said a voice. Jerrett tried to rise above the fugue in his mind. The man speaking wears a high collared leather coat, shiny black as if it had just passed under a shower. His hair is drawn back from his forehead and wetted down so that it looks like a ribbed oil slick sweeping across his head. His expression is grim and as pale as those of the men half dragging Jerrett between them.
Beyond the commissar, two men stand against wooden posts, their hands tied behind them. Other posts beside the men are empty. Jerrett is shoved past the officer towards them.
“Cowardice is treachery,” the commissar said, addressing a group of maybe a dozen soldiers. “Running from the Emperor’s enemies is as good as joining them. Why? Because the traitor reveals his hand at the moment most likely to cause harm to the defenders of the Imperium. Can you tell me how that is different from cowardice?”
The soldiers being addressed were silent. The ones with Jerrett ignore the officer and concentrate on tying his hands to a post.
“Exactly,” said the commissar. “It is not. And so, if we give death to traitors, should we not also give death to cowards? These men have damned themselves by their actions; they are not fit to serve the glorious name of the Emperor...”
The voice ceases to make sense to Jerrett. What was the man saying? Who was he talking about? He wants to tell the officer that this is a mistake; that he shouldn’t be here. That he is only a driver of a mass transit vehicle in a minor city half a continent away, and this is nothing to do with him.
The man next to him cries out, shouting at the officer until an elbow across the face silences him. He slumps forward. That draws a response from the other man, and he begins to shout obscenities, cursing the commissar, the Imperium, the greenskins and anything else under the starved yellow sun of the world. A soldier puts the butt of his stubgun hard into the man’s midriff and he falls against his restraints, coughing and weeping.
A soldier approaches them. In his hands he hold three slips of white paper. He pins one to Jerrett’s chest and moves to the next prisoner. Jerrett stares around, uncomprehending. What was going on?
It is not until the rest of the soldiers step forward and raise their guns that it dawns on him what is actually happening. Even then, the realisation is so slow making its way through his mind that he never really understands what it is. That in itself is something of a mercy.
Jerrett thinks of a thousand things in those last moments, snippets of a life that whirl past at the speed of light; of his mother and father; when he cheated on his entrance exams for the city transportation department; Vos split like an autumn log by a roaring alien; kissing a girl for the first time; his bashful pride at putting on a PDF uniform. He looks to the sky, thinking that perhaps there might be a last sliver of blue to hold on to, but there is nothing put grey clouds and a pale-yellow sun somewhere above them that cannot break though.
There is a barked command from the commissar. The soldiers take aim. Another command. Jerrett never hears the final crack as the stubguns fire.
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