Author Information
Ron Elliott
Title Of this Story
The First Among Many
I.
They told us it would take six weeks to get to Vraks. After eight, we knew something was wrong. Maybe we’d gotten caught in a warp storm. Maybe something went wrong with the Gellar field. Nobody ever told us.
After six months, it got pretty dangerous aboard the Heavy Lancer. Men were going mad. The chow lines were like walking into a gladiator pit. The commissars were everywhere, and they were executing a platoon’s worth of us every day.
Then some of us started seeing The Path. It was a glistening, bloody trail in our vision. At first you didn’t feel any real urge to follow it. But if you did, The Path always led to something that relieved the boredom. Usually a fight. The first time I followed it, The Path led me to Bilks. Bilks wanted to kill me, I knew that as soon as I saw him. He was facing away from me, shoveling meal bricks into his mouth. I could see the tension in his shoulders. He was waiting for me. When I jammed my boot knife into the back of his neck, between the third and fourth vertebrae, it was good.
Somebody must have told Confessor Pickman about seeing The Path, because now the Ministorum stooges were roaming the ship in packs. And they always had at least one commissar dogging their heels. We painted the bulkheads with their blood.
After we were finished, we cut our way into the bridge. It took three days. Whoever designed the Heavy Lancer had given some thought to delaying mutineers. By the time we got in, the bridge crew had settled things among themselves. Those who didn’t see The Path had been thrown out the command deck’s airlocks.
We followed The Path to our salvation. Even in the blurry madness of the warp, it was there, guiding us. We escaped the warp, and The Path led us here, to Canaan Secundus.
We stumbled out of the landers, and the locals knew something was wrong with us. I can’t imagine how we must have looked after nearly a year in the warp. I ran into an agriworker first. He climbed down off his cultivator and came toward me, stumbling a bit as he craned his neck, trying to take in the towering bulk of the lander. Then his eyes met mine, and I was ashamed. His hand flew up to cover his mouth, his eyes bulged in horror. He started backing away. I couldn’t bear it. None of us could. So we started killing them.
The Planetary Defense Force was a joke. We’d been rampaging for almost three days before they mustered any kind of response. And even then, the fools kept thinking only in terms of set-piece battles. They refused to engage without layered defenses, artillery support, air cover. All of it. We went through them like a killing wind. We feasted on their fear. By then, most of us couldn’t feel much in the way of pain, so it took a lot to stop us.
After we’d finished off the last of the defenders, we moved on to the cities. The planet was either pre-hive, or the population wasn’t large enough to require vertical buildup. A lot of us started wearing hoods. It made things easier. We didn’t have to see our faces reflected in their eyes. The slaughter went on for weeks. We were too crazed with blood to remember the tanks and the artillery waiting aboard our landers. We killed with lasguns and chainswords until the battery packs ran out. Then we killed with whatever came to hand. Blunt or sharp, it didn’t matter, as long as the blood flowed. The blood mattered. It was the only thing that still did.
When we’d turned the last of the cities into silent abattoirs, we started in on the pets: canids, felids, and some kind of gene-spliced furry lizard. They were wild with fear by that time, and were hard to catch. When they were gone, we went after the herd animals. I never knew grox had so much blood in them. Gallons of it. And red. So red.
It took us four weeks to kill Canaan Secundus. I know I didn’t sleep a wink that entire time. I doubt anybody else did either. After everything else was dead, we built great bonfires and howled at the ash-clouded sky for days. After the rage drained out of us, we were just numb. No officers to give orders, no confessors or priests to tell us what to think or feel. We sat around the dying embers of the great fires, hoping that the ragged hoods hiding our faces also hid our desperately searching eyes. No one could see The Path, and no one wanted to admit it.
I was staring into the orange corpselight of a pyre with Pym the giant, Hockner, a few others, when Terra’s vengeance arrived. Hockner stood up, scratching beneath his hood with ragged fingernails and starting to say some useless thing, when his head just slid off his shoulders. The head rolled between my feet, and I saw dark blood bubble from the hood’s slash of a mouth. Hockner’s body fell over and a dark shape even bigger than Pym stepped over the twitching corpse. The figure’s torso was blocky with carapace armor. The figure lowered its left hand, which held a softly glowing power blade, and brought up its right. That one held a silenced bolt pistol.
Pym and I fell on our faces. In Pym’s case, he pitched forward, directly into the fire. All the others died when our attacker waved the bolt pistol across the group. Each time the big pistol coughed, one of us exploded in a shower of gore and rags. Pym stood up, the chest and one sleeve of his filthy Guard tunic burning, and charged the figure. Pym got inside the firing arc of the bolt pistol and got two deep slashes across his belly from the power blade before he was able to grab the shooter’s left arm. The two giants began a deadly grappling match, kicking up sparks as they shuffled and staggered through the dying fire.
I got up and drew my gutting blade, the good, springy one with serrated edges. I saw more armored figures outlined against the other camp fires. Each one handing out double-fisted slaughter. They were killing us before we even knew we had company on Canaan Secundus. I glanced back to the fight at hand. Fear twisted my guts as I recognized Pym’s opponent. It was an astartes. One of their scouts. I don’t know which Chapter. The scout’s armor was subdued for night operations, and I couldn’t see any iconography. But what did it matter if I saw a wolf’s head, a winged sword, or a blood drop on his pauldron? Oh, gods. Terra had sent the astartes after us.
I tried to flee. I took two steps back from the fire and slipped in the guts of one of the Lancer men. I sprawled headlong into the gore. I rolled over and somebody, Pym or the astartes, kicked me in the temple during their struggle.
I don’t know how long I was out. I came to and couldn’t breathe. I was on my back with a dead weight crushing my chest. The weight turned out to be Pym’s corpse. My left arm and leg were pinned beneath him, but my right leg and my knife hand were free. By some blind luck, I still had the knife. My hood was twisted around, but I could see our campsite out of the right eye hole. I could see bodies and a pair of heavy boots stalking around. One of the group--Sincarl, maybe--was still twitching. The boots walked over and stepped on Sincarl’s throat. I could hear vertebrae grinding and popping.
I shifted position quietly, quietly, trying to see more out of the eye hole. The boots belonged to another astartes scout. This one had snooper goggles strapped to his face, and cradled a long needle rifle. A sniper, then. Come down from the high ground to clean up after the assaulters had moved on. The scout moved toward the tangled pile of me and Pym, then spun away, quick as a viper, as a knot of resin popped and sizzled in the dying campfire. And then I saw The Path. A wavering line, insubstantial as moonlight, leading straight under the scout’s feet and off into a line of distant hills.
I drew in as much breath as Pym allowed me, then braced my legs and left arm. I gave a mighty heave and rolled the carcass off me. The scout’s head snapped around. He started shifting the needle rifle. His left side was toward me, his legs only an arm’s reach away. Ceramite greaves strapped over the scout’s heavy boots protected his shins, but the backs of his legs were unprotected. Atill on the ground, I slashed across the scout’s calves, just above the ankles. My knife bit deep. I heard both Achilles tendons let go with wet snaps. The scout gave a whistling grunt of pain and went over on his back.
He’d dropped the needle rifle. I knocked it away and straddled his torso. I slashed across the left side of the scout’s neck, but only nicked the artery. He had something like subdermal plastek plates protecting his neck. A great paw shot out, snatched off my hood, and completely encircled my throat. My air was instantly cut off. I slashed again, severing the artery, and then started blindly sawing at the front of the scout’s throat. The hand around my neck clamped down further, and now it was my turn to feel vertebrae grinding together. The astartes just wouldn't die.
Through the graying tunnel of my vision, I saw the scout looking into my warp-twisted face. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the goggles, but I could hear hate in his voice. “Heretic,” he said. Like it was poison on his tongue. Like he could spit the hate into my face. “Heretic.” The strength drained out of me. I couldn’t keep up the pressure on the knife. I was sliding sideways. The black, ash-smelling night got darker.
II.
My eyes were open for a while before I could see anything. Or think about anything. My eyes stung and watered. I tried to swallow, but my throat felt like it was full of cut-wire, so I didn’t try that again. It was smoke making my eyes sting. The smoke smelled sweet, like roasting meat. Yes, that made sense, because Pym…
I heard something. It was a good ways off, but I knew what it was. Once you hear the bang-shriek-crump of a boltgun, you don’t mistake it for anything else. Astartes use bolters.
I rolled to my feet. Blood thudded in my ears, all my senses panic-bright and hot.
I grabbed for the gutting knife, but the scabbard on my web gear was empty. Then I saw it, still lodged in the throat of the astartes scout. The one I’d killed, that had also damned near killed me. I spent a few seconds trying to pull it free, but it wouldn’t come. The part of Pym that lay in the embers sizzled and smoked. My throat was on fire. I gave up on the knife. I looked around the campsite. Somebody’s canteen lay nearby, but it was flattened in the middle of a patch of mud. The astartes giant must have stepped on it.
Bang-shriek-crump. Another single shot, out in the darkness. There was no return fire, no crack-crack-crack of an answering lasgun. That meant the astartes held the field. They were finishing off those of us too wounded to crawl away. When we’d built our great bonfires on the open plain, we thought we were the only things left alive on Canaan Secundus. Now I crouched like a hunted animal, the need to hide filling every part of me, but there was nowhere to go.
No. There was nowhere to hide. But I could follow The Path.
It was still there, leading into the low hills. The Path knew what you wanted. Sometimes when you saw it, it pulsed an arterial red. If you followed it then, it would lead you to a kill. Or a slaughter. Now the path floated in front of my eyes, just pale and pink, waving like a snake. Or a ribbon in a breeze. The end of it—or the beginning, I don’t know which—didn’t move, though. It was anchored in the low hills to the east. I found somebody’s dropped laspistol, saw that it still had half a charge, and sprinted along The Path.
With each step, I waited for the terrible sound. Bang. The propellant hurling the bolt shell from the barrel, spinning. Shriek. The little chemical rocket in the bolt’s tail, driving it up past the speed of sound in just a few feet. Crump. The explosive tip detonating inside my body.
Would I hear the crump? Would I feel anything? Did I want to?
I felt nothing. I just kept running. My boots thudding, over and over, on the trampled grass of the plain.
***
Turned out I wasn’t the only survivor. Or at least, not the only one who made it off the plain. Some of the others hadn’t lived to go much further, though. I walked past a few bodies as I trudged up the rough gravel road, climbing into the hills. They were all ours, no astartes dead. Maybe the astartes hadn’t come up here, yet.
I still felt like hot breath was on my neck, or like a las targeter was dancing on my back. But I stopped and searched the bodies anyway. I needed water. And a knife. I wasn’t sure which I wanted more. The bodies had nothing except wounds and bad smells. There were several sets of boot prints heading up the gravel road. Not giant sized. I thought maybe somebody had already stripped the bodies of anything useful.
Once, after sun up, I heard one of the astartes’ landspeeders, whining high above. I dropped flat and crawled, ass and elbows, into the shade of a rock. The speeder was up as high as its gravitics would lift it, headed south. Going someplace, not hunting. But I still wouldn’t move. Nothing could have made me move. Not until long after the sound of it was gone.
***
The hills weren’t much. But they got me up and away from the plain. And the astartes. I was thirsty, though. The kind of thirsty that makes your tongue swell up, and you can feel your lips start to crack open.
Around a bend of rock, I heard something. Gravel crunching, and maybe something being shoved or dragged around. I checked the charge in the laspistol and walked forward to see what was what.
I saw one of the battle chaplains from the Heavy Lancer—Rizer, maybe his name was—standing over a body, fitting a power cell into the handle of his evicerator. The body had been raggedly sawn in half by Rizer’s two-handed chain weapon. A regular chainsword, standard Guard issue for non-coms, lay nearby. Rizer looked over at me, grunted, and went back to what he was doing. I didn’t have a holster for the laspistol, but I’d have kept it out anyway. I kept my voice casual as I asked Rizer about the chewed-up sergeant, one of our former shipmates.
“Found him here. Wounded, probably dying. He wouldn’t give me this battery, and I needed it.” Rizer looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, and didn’t like. “Sergeant Tann was headed the right way, though. He was going up. Following The Path. Same as us.” He paused, stared me hard in the face, and said “Right?” I didn’t say anything. Decided it was smarter not to.
We stood there eying each other. A sound carried up to us, coming up the gravel road. A mixed roaring and metallic clatter. I would have said it was a Chimera, but underneath the petrochem’s rumble was a whine, rising and fading. That was a supercharger. Our Salamander scout tracks had superchargers. But just because it was one of ours didn’t mean it was full of friendlies. Rizer was proof of that. I should have been hiding. Rizer should have, too. But neither one of us wanted to take our eyes off the other.
The scout track pulled up next to us. Five hooded heads turned and looked at us. Couldn’t see their eyes, of course. Rizer’s eyes finally left mine. He looked at his evicerator. Revved it, once. Then slung it over his shoulder and climbed aboard the Salamander, taking the gunner/observer’s seat, like he owned it. He pointed further up the gravel road, and the driver looked at him for a minute, then nodded.
I climbed into the open crew compartment in the back with four others. They stared at me and said nothing. They made no room on the bench seats as the Salamander dropped into gear and lurched forward. They’d scrounged some equipment—it was rattling around on the scuffed metal floor. Three lasguns. A bandolier of grenades, but no launcher. Two folding entrenching tools, one bent and blood-spattered. A plastek water carrier with a few swallows left in it rolled and bumped against my boots.
I picked it up, unscrewed the cap. The four men in the back watched me. If they had any other water, I didn’t see it. I pulled off my hood and gulped down what was left, except for one mouthful. It didn’t do much to put out the dry fire in my throat. I stared back at the empty-eyed hoods. Turned the carrier upside down and let the last few drops splatter on the floor. Then I tossed the water carrier over the side. The hoods turned away from me. I squatted down and rested my back against the folding ramp.
***
We followed The Path—or at least, Rizer did. The road kept disappearing under rockslides and washouts. But Rizer seemed to know where he was going. The sun was going down when the Salamander clattered to a stop in a canyon. We were at the north end. The south wall of the canyon was just two building-sized slabs of ceramite. Big almighty blast doors. Man-high letters were stenciled on the doors, but they were too faded to read. Maybe 50 other men from the Heavy Lancer were already there, milling about in the shadow of the doors. Waiting. Not knowing for what.
Rizer jumped off the Salamander. He ignored the other men, went up to the doors. He stared up at them for a bit, humming bits and snatches of a hymn—God Machines of Terra, I think. Then he took a couple steps to the right and brushed away some dust and grit. He opened a small hatch, finding an old keypad and a dark, cracked LED screen. He punched a few buttons. Nothing happened. He punched a few more, waited. Nothing. The men lost interest. Some started wandering away. One stood off by himself, carefully slicing thin strips of skin off his white, flabby gut with a sword bayonet.
One of the doors shivered and made a deep grinding noise.
It opened a few feet, stopped, opened a few more. A dull boom came from somewhere deep in the mechanism. Something breaking that could never be fixed. Rizer walked into the bar of solid blackness between the doors. The opening swallowed him up. Just like he’d never been. But we could hear his Guard-issue boots, the worn soles coming away from the synth-hide uppers. Flapping on a plasticrete floor. Fading.
A fight broke out. A man on the Salamander started to take the dust cover off the searchlight, meaning to shine it after Rizer. Somebody else drew a knife and started screaming about the sanctity of darkness. The knife screamer shut up when a lasround burned though the back of his hood. Some hollered that we should follow Rizer. Others wanted to know who the feth was Rizer? A few men, or what used to be men, came unglued at all the shouting and slashed at anything nearby with lengths of sharpened rebar.
I didn’t join in. I followed Rizer. It was blacker than space in there. I couldn’t hear him up ahead. But soon, I could hear the others following me. Shuffling and stumbling after me in the dark. Up ahead, greenish light flickered awake in long bars on the ceiling. Blunt-nosed APCs were parked in rows on both sides of us, covered in gritty dust. They had the old-style balloon tires. Almost every tire was flat. We all shuffled forward, stood around Rizer under the fluorescents. Their light made a weird buzz in our heads.
Our old chaplain looked around at us. The Warp hadn’t melted or twisted his face, but his eyes were wrong. Most of the men couldn’t meet his gaze for long. The few without hoods dropped their heads and shuffled back into the shadows.
“Who’s got their Primer?” Rizer asked softly. The men stirred, said nothing.
“Come on! The Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer. Who’s got theirs?” Crazy light was starting to spin in Rizer’s eyes. He looked like a happy drunk. He pulled a battered Primer out of a pocket on his vest. “Got mine right here!” He held it up. “Holy guidance from Him on Earth, mass printed, so that even dirty, low-born soldiers like us can carry His word! As His Astronomicon is a beacon to those sailing the Warp, each Primer is a light in the darkness of battle. A priceless gift to each one of us!”
He ripped it in half.
All us monsters gasped. After slaughtering our officers, our commissars… after murdering a world… we still had some belief. Faith, even. We stepped back from Rizer, all of us at the same time, like he was ground zero for an orbital strike.
He grinned at us. He circled inside the group, tearing out pages, tossing them in hooded faces.
“Get ‘em out, men! I need to see one Primer per soldier, right now, by Throne!”
Boots shuffled. The Primer was the first thing they gave you, even before you took the Oath of Service. You had to sleep with it under the thin pillow on your bunk. You had to carry it with you at all times. Any officer could demand that a Guardsman produce his Primer at any time. The commissars could shoot you if you didn’t have it. My hand automatically went to a pocket of my ragged fatigue pants. I pulled it away quickly, but Rizer saw me. It was like he disappeared from where he’d been and appeared right up in my face. He was that fast.
“Soldier! Show me your Primer!” He bellowed it like a drill sergeant, but his eyes were laughing. Like he was inviting me in on a joke. But they were also asking, maybe. Follow my lead, they said. I pulled out my Primer, displayed it in front of me like a first-day recruit. Rizer’s eyes sought mine. He nodded, just a little movement of his chin. Trust me, his eyes said.
Without thinking, I brought the Primer to my lips and caught a few pages in my teeth. I closed my eyes and jerked my head sideways, and a whuffing sound—half surprise and half fear—came out of me. A whole chapter tore out of the binding, the binding that had been blessed by Ministorum priests on Terra. I looked around. Scores of hooded men had their Primers out.
The chaplain smiled. Nodded. Pointed at me. “This man,” he roared. “This man is the First. The First Among Many! For he knows the truth!” Rizer snatched another Primer from a Lancer man’s hands, threw it to the floor, and ground it beneath his heel. He laughed at the fear-wide eyes showing through the holes of the hood.
“See? Nothing! No punishment. No consequences. Because He doesn’t care! That’s the truth, and all the indoctrination, all the commissars, all the Infantryman’s Uplifting fething Primers… their only purpose is to hide it from you!”
Rizer stomped over to another of the Lancer men. “You! Have you ever felt His hand upon you? When the guts start flying… do you think He’s watching?
“Did He rescue us from the Warp calm? When the navigator led the ship in prayer by the hour, did He answer? The God-Emperor of Mankind is a corpse, rotting on the Throne of Terra! He answers no one.” Rizer was working himself into a kind of ecstasy. Ropes of spit flew from his lips. He pinwheeled his arms. Like a man chained in a dark hole, suddenly freed.
“The God Emperor puts lasguns in our hands and tells us to fight. But He only rewards us for dying. He asks everything, and He gives nothing. What use is a god like that? He didn’t save us from the Warp. He didn’t show us The Path.” Hooded heads came up at that. Breaths caught. Rizer’s voice got quiet. “Oh yes. The Path.” He pointed at me again. “He sees it. I see it. All of you are here because you see it.
“We pleaded in the madness of the Warp, and we were answered. We were shown the Eightfold Path.” Something clicked in my mind. The Path had a name all along, I just hadn’t known how to say it. I felt the same recognition run through the group, like fever.
“The Ministorum lied to us about their god. But there are other gods—gods they didn’t want us to know about. Gods more likely to hear… and to answer.” Rizer stopped ranting, squeezed his eyes shut. He balled up his fists. Like he was bracing for a blow.
“Khorne,” he said. I don’t know what changed in the room. I’ve never been aboard a ship that had been hulled—most people who got decompressed didn’t live to talk about it. But having all the air and pressure sucked away and hard vacuum—cold, cold nothingness—replace it. Maybe that’s what it felt like. There was pain in my ears. And ringing. Rizer had said the… name, whatever the word was, in a normal speaking voice. But my ears felt like a shell had burst nearby. I looked at Rizer. Dark blood was leaking from one nostril. I don’t think he knew.
“Khorne is the greatest of The Powers. He is a god for soldiers, for killers like us!” Something had been swelling inside us while we listened. Now it burst. We roared. We shouted the name of this new god into each other faces, and watched as lips split and skin tore. No more killing for Him on Terra. Now we killed for ourselves. And for this new god.
Rizer kept it up, but most of us weren’t hearing him anymore. “Spilt blood is his praise! Kill in his name, and you will be rewarded!” I watched a Lancer man drop his Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer, push down his ragged overalls, and shit on the sacred book—a splattery, liquid stream of filth. Another man watched, shrieked laughter. He yanked a bayonet from his belt and jammed it into the belly the shitter. Both men stared down at the pouring red gout. So did I. It was beautiful. It was right, somehow. I wanted there to be more of it. I took the bayonet from its owner. He was still staring at the blood, and didn’t resist. I slid it into his left side, underneath his floating ribs. Angling the long blade up, through the lungs, into the heart. Hot, living blood poured over my hand. The three of us, the two dying men and me, roared with joy.
We killed each other for a long time. Our boots slipped and sloshed in blood. The living, splashing heat of it filled our minds. It was sealed up in human plumbing, but that wasn’t right. So we slashed and stabbed and clawed until we freed it.
When I came back to myself, I watched the strongest of us keep bleeding the weaker ones. I was dizzy. I wondered what the air was like outside. Had it been night or day, when we followed Rizer in here? I couldn’t remember. I walked back through the darkness. Away from the green, buzzing light, the copper tang of blood.
I walked out through the partly open bunker door, breathed the air. It was dark. But a later dark, or a whole different night, I couldn’t say. Rizer was out there, staring at the sky. I wondered if I’d come out here to find him, and why I might have done that.
I stood next to the Chaplain for a long while, not saying anything. Even in the dark, I could see the right side of his face was swollen. From singing the praises of our new god. Now, his eyes were closed—not looking at the stars, like I thought. Listening, maybe. So I did, too. And I heard.
It was faint. First, it was like blood pounding in my ears. Then it grew into a soft roar, and changed again. Now like fat, heavy drops of rain pattering, then a downpour. A downpour became a flash flood, a rolling wave. But it didn’t sound like water, somehow. It sounded thicker, more alive.
“Do you hear it?” Rizer asked.
“What is it?”
“There. Low on the horizon.” Rizer pointed. “That red star. Vraks. That’s where they were sending us.” Now that I was looking at the distant sun, it was like tuning in a radio. That pounding sound came in clearer. Made my heart beat faster. It called to me.
“That’s the sound of ten thousand men spilling each other’s blood every day. Slaughter, unending. An offering, if ever there was one. That’s where we’ll go.”
“And kill who?”
Rizer turned his punched-looking face to me. He smiled. “Does it matter?”
No, I decided. It didn’t matter at all.
III.
The astartes scouts had parked their assault craft in a river valley. A sheer cliff face concealed it from the east, a sparse forest hid it from the other direction. We crept and crawled through those trees now. The Path led us here. It knew what we wanted.
Some of the Lancer men didn’t want to tangle with astartes again. Rizer had an answer for that, too.
Khorne wanted bloodshed. Needed it. Spill blood in his name--any blood--and he’d reward you. Rizer said, if the Blood God rewarded us for killing each other, imagine the reward for astartes blood. I’d killed an astartes. Barely. I didn’t know if I’d gotten any great reward or not. But I knew I had to get to Vraks. To bathe in the great slaughter. The Heavy Lancer was a useless hulk in orbit, its fuel spent. We’d burned any starships we caught on the ground here on Canaan Secundus. The only way off-planet was the astartes’ ship.
I peered through the long-las’s nightscope. One of the others had found the rifle somewhere. He didn’t want to give it up. I guess I wanted it more. Two astartes giants stood guard at the bottom of the open boarding ramp. I rested the crosshairs on one of their heads while it turned back and forth. Like a machine, scanning the night. It was hard to stay still enough to snipe him. Something didn’t want me to kill this way. From a distance.
I exhaled half a breath, squeezed the trigger. Just as I fired, the astartes looked right at me. He didn’t crouch so much as he unhinged his knees. The las round burned over his head and spanged off the ramp. How did the bastard know? No man could have known. But I wasn’t shooting at a man. The astartes were the Emperor’s own gene muties. Everybody’d seen the devotional vids. But who knew what they could really do?
The astartes fired back even as he ducked. Two bolts detonated a tree to my right, throwing splinters. A third screamed past my ear. I rolled away from the splintered tree, found another handy. The astartes strafed the area with a long burst, killing trees. I leaned around the tree and risked a shot, center of mass this time. Hit him. The las round splattered drops of melted ceramite from the astartes’ breastplate, but didn’t penetrate.
Now I could hear the animal howls of the others, crashing through the underbrush, charging the astartes scouts. The one I’d shot fired another burst into my tree, then switched to shooting at the assaulters.
I watched one, two, three Lancer men blown into bloody clouds. Nothing left of their torsos bigger than wet gobbets the size of Throne gelds. The blood set me off. The last of the trained soldier in me disappeared down some dark hole. Leaving only a berserker. I charged straight down the hill, bounding over fallen trunks, sprawling headlong over rocks. Others ran straight through the astartes fire, got there first. Trying to swamp the two giants with numbers. The scouts started breaking arms and cracking skulls with their bare hands.
At some point, I’d reversed my grip on the long-las. I reached the scrum and swung it like a club. One of the scouts stiff-armed a Lancer man, sent him stumbling back toward me. So my first blow caved in the side of my ex-shipmate’s head. I shoved aside the dying man, saw the scout raising his bolter. Looking down the big barrel was like looking down an Earthshaker cannon. I swung out with the lasgun, letting its hot barrel slide through my fists, lengthening my reach. The butt end struck the bolter’s forward casing. But it didn’t move, the astartes’ grip was too strong.
I heard the scream of a revving chain weapon, then the ugly wet burr of the teeth bogging down in muscle and bone. Hot, stinging wetness washed across my face, into my eyes. I roared, swung blindly. I heard two meaty thunks and felt the shocks up my arms. Then I was knocked down and I lost hold of the long-las.
There was no more bolter fire, only grunts and heavy blows landing, and cracking, splintering bone. Something lukewarm poured over my head, washing my eyes clean. Rizer, with a canteen. He tossed it away and grabbed hold of my web gear. He hauled me to my feet with scary, one-handed strength.
“Back with us?” he asked. I stared. Nodded. “Let’s go. Got to secure the flight deck.” The others were wildly stomping the two dead astartes into mush. Strange organs I’d never seen come out of a man burst and squelched under their boots.
Inside, the ship was built for giants. Hatch controls were too far up the walls. Screams and gunfire echoed through the too-high corridors. Mad shrieks from Lancer men. Deep roars from astartes. We climbed out-sized metal stairs. Awkward. Each one required two steps. We gained the bridge. It was deserted. Most of the astartes scouts must have been out in the hills, hunting us. Like vermin.
There was a dead man in the middle of the flight deck. Or half of one, at least. A torso and head were set into a socket, about waist-high from the deck plates. The torso had no arms. Gray-white skin hung from bone. Cables and tubes came out of the body and snaked up to the ceiling. Some of the tubes were clear. Different colors of sludge gurgled in them. No way to tell if the tubes were pumping something into the dead man, or pumping something out.
The body wasn’t dead. The eyes fluttered open. Rizer walked over and stood in front of the torso. After a bit, the dead eyes dragged around to look at him. I realized the thing had a bronze plate set into the center of its forehead. The plate looked like it could swing open on tiny little hinges. A sort of fancy eye was engraved in the plate. I thought of our long-dead Navigator from the Heavy Lancer, and the turban-like thing he wore to hide his mutation.
“You,” Rizer demanded. “Navis Nobilite, right?” The thing’s blue, shriveled lips opened. But its mouth just hung slack. “I guess what they did to you is supposed to be a great honor.”
Now the thing croaked out a rusty answer. “Honor…. through… service.”
Chaplain Rizer smiled. “Then serve me, and the Power that speaks through me . Take this ship to Vraks.”
“You are… the Enemy. You know… that I… will not,” the Navigator thing rasped. Rizer actually laughed, and his eyes filled up with mad, killing light. He pulled out a black stub pistol and pressed the muzzle against the bronze eye-plate.
“What I know, is that if you don’t navigate this ship, I’ll put a bullet right through your freak eye. All this augmetic shit, you might even survive it. But you’ll be blind in the dark. You’ll never see the Beacon again.”
“… Astronomicon…” the thing said. I heard a mix yearning, fear. “Light of… Terra.”
Rizer leaned in and pushed harder with the gun. Some sort of plastek creaked as the mutant’s head got pushed back on its neck.
“I will sail… the Empyrean. Though it costs… my soul… I will navigate.”
Vraks. The great slaughter. We would glory in it.
