The Tactica Imperium contains any number of strategies for combating the multitude of threats that the average trooper is likely to encounter. Most of them boil down to "shoot them until they die, then stomp on their heads to make sure" or "if in doubt, call in an artillery barrage." At no point, in any of those pages, is the word "daemon" mentioned. The routine response to anything vaguely warpy is usually to kick it up the chain until someone gets an Astartes on the vox, or our artillery stops shelling our own troopers and does something useful for a change. Calling the Navy for air support is usually out, on account of the fact that everything they do usually makes things worse – see what remains of Cable outside for evidence on that point.
So, as you can imagine, we had no drekking idea what we were supposed to do according to the book. Lacking any real training on the matter, we just started throwing everything we had at the daemon. Trigger had started firing while the rest of us were still thinking: "Emperor's golden bollocks, there's a drekking daemon over there," or: "Where's the drekking Inquisition when you actually need them?" I wouldn't put it down to combat training or strong willpower born from hundreds of engagements. Shooting things is just Trigger's natural reaction to any situation that gets on her nerves, scares her, upsets her, annoys her, or generally moves her needle of tolerance out of its minute green zone. It's why she's not allowed to have any weapons on her whenever we play cards. It doesn't stop her trying to punch us, but nobody's likely to end up getting a shiv pulled out of their shoulder.
Trigger's shots tore dark holes in the mass of flesh. A distended head exploded, showering thick, green, gelatinous blood across the floor and walls. The blood hissed and spat, chewing holes wherever it landed, acrid smoke billowing up. The daemon's mouths howled again, and dragged itself forwards like a slug. People were shouting – Thorpe, Smiler, Blondie, other NCOs. A trooper across the hall from me was screaming, clawing at his eyes, his photolense goggles sitting askew on his head. We're not meant to take on this kind of drekk. Give us a line to hold, a trench to take, a mine or cave to clear out, we'll get it done. This drekk was just beyond what we were meant for. But there it was, lurching towards us, and we followed instinct.
At least, we followed our second instinct. First instinct is to run the drekk away, call in an artillery barrage to level the offending building and everything in a square kilometre around it, call in an armoured corps to flatten what's left, call in the Astartes to stomp on the ground just to make sure, and then ask the Navy to shave a kilometre or two off the planet's surface to make absolutely sure – they can't drekk that kind of thing up. Lacking all of the above as an option, we just put the hellguns on full-auto and pulled the trigger, which is usually a good tactic in the Astra Militarum when faced by something you don't know, like, or understand.
A hail of lasfire and heavy stubber rounds cut into the daemon. Arms, legs, heads, bone, and chunks of metal went flying. The noise was deafening. The overlapping shrieking, discordant howls of a platoon's-worth of hellgunsr; the heavy stubbers chattered and rattled; the ogryn's ripper gun thumped like a mortar; Thorpe's bolt pistol; screams of rage, fury, fear, or just to add to the noise; the sizzling, and heavy thumps of impacts; the meaty slaps of the daemon's numerous extraneous limbs being blasted away into the walls, floor, and ceiling; and the constant, endless wailing of those drekking heads. Even when they were blown apart, the drekking wailing seemed to get louder. It's impossible to understand completely without being there. It's pure mess, distilled into sound. And all of it was amplified in the claustrophobic confines of the corridor.
A lot is made of the horrifying sights we see on our all-expenses-paid-for tour of the Imperium's deadliest planets; but for me, it's the noise – or lack of it – that sticks around long after the images of dead or dying friends, or dead and dying xenos. When it gets quiet, that's when I get tense, and I start looking for weapons that aren't there. Silence means nobody is shooting at you; and if nobody's shooting at you, it means they're lining up their shots. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. Ignore all that. It's just the kind of drekk that gets stuck in your head after one-too-many years in the AM.
Despite the torrent of fire we poured out, the daemon didn't seem to care. Of course, being an abomination of the warp, it could be that it simply didn't feel anything that hit it. Either way, the thing just kept sliding forwards, like a giant slug of doom. It was maybe twenty metres away when it stopped, and started quivering. The whole fleshy blob was roiling, arms and legs waving, the heads bouncing up and down, slack jaws extending and clenching as the slug-like creature jiggled. It might have been funny – like something out of one of the sub-hive mutant circuses – if it hadn't been doing that after being shot a few hundred times at near-point-blank range.
The Giant Slug of Doom let out a massive shriek that hit me like a sledgehammer wielded by an Astartes on frenzon. I went flying back, hit a wall, rebounded, and went sprawling onto the floor in a heap of gear and cursing. I spat out every curse and oath I knew in a mix of Low-Goth and Weissari gang-slang as I tried to disentangle myself. My ribs ached – some of them were probably cracked, if not broken; the gash on the back of my head had certainly opened back up; my legs had decided they'd had enough of this drekk and refused to move; and for the second time in as many hours, I had the worst headache of my life. Today was certainly not going well for me.
As I tried to get my bearings and sort the floor from the ceiling, I felt a giant hand clamp around my arm, and then jerk it so hard the limb nearly came out of the socket. I screamed in pain, fury, and frustration. Even my would-be rescuer was drekking up the job. Mixed in beneath the sounds of full-auto hellgun fire, I heard scraps of a quick conversation. The hand released, then tried again, this time hoisting me up by the collar of my overalls. My hellgun swung from the strap around my neck, like a gibbet-corpse. It was a credit to how badly I'd been knocked around that I barely even registered the cloying stink of Nudds, Thorpe's ogryn-shaped shadow. His huge features swam in and out of focus, stretching, distorting, like the heads on that drekking daemon.
"Back on your feet, Corporal," Nudds grunted. He attempted to put me down gently, failed completely, and my knees buckled under the weight. Nudds pulled me back up again, and inched me down until my feet were firmly planted on the ground, then released me. I took a few shallow gasps, ascertained that I'd been bounced directly into a cell, took a moment to appreciate the irony of the entire situation, and started towards the door.
"Thanks," I grunted to Nudds, though I didn't mean it. I wanted the bastard dead, and now I owed him.
Honour is a strange thing in gang life. In some respect, it's more prevalent. In an underworld where there are no laws, honour – however twisted in its form - is the only thing that separates the gangs from the gutter-drekk. It starts, and ends, with blood. Spill blood together, and you're bound together; save someone's life, the same rule applies. I didn't owe Nudds his life, but I couldn't shoot him in the back of the head and be done with it. I'm a professional criminal; I'm not some black-hat scum that woke up with a hangover and an itchy trigger finger.
"How are you doing?" Blackeyes poked her head out from behind Nudds. Red las-fire flickered, framing her head like one of the stained-glass saints of a grand cathedral.
"I'm fine," I gasped, trying and failing to ignore the pain in my ribs.
I staggered to the door, and saw that the Giant Slug of Doom was closer than ever. Strange, bloody lumps lay in front of it - exactly where our point squad had been. Looking closer, and ignoring my impending death by giant slug for a moment, I stared with a sick sort of fascination at the bodies of first squad, which had been turned completely inside-out. Blackeyes followed my gaze, then quickly shouldered her hellgun and started firing.
"Blondie is in a bad way," Blackeyes shouted. "And Flatline's lost most of an arm."
I didn't bother asking who was in command. You didn't need anyone to tell you to keep shooting until you had to get the drekk out of there. Cohesion was barely being kept by the NCOs. Without the vox-net, we were down to screaming at each other over the thundering noise. And all the while, the daemon was coming closer. It was looking somewhat the worse for wear – blood oozed from dozens of wounds, and the floor was pitted with holes spewing dark smoke – but still, it just kept moving forwards.
The slug shunted itself forwards. The remaining limbs on the front of its body stretched forwards. A burst of stubber-fire shredded one completely, but the daemon ignored it, and the arms started pulling the closest bloody corpse towards it. The heads let out what I could only describe as a sigh of satisfaction – it sounded almost orgasmic in some sense. Slowly, I saw the wet, bloody corpse, its greasy organs shining, being absorbed into the Giant Slug of Doom. The daemon's body roiled and shook as it seemed to vibrate with the kind of warpy energy that always precedes the worst kind of drekk. A bloody skull popped out of the skin, tongue lolling out. A pair of arms followed, then the legs. Organs, muscles, and bone filled in the damage we'd done like a disgusting scab.
Amidst all of this, my mind was turning. Half of it was in favour of vomiting; the other half had the kind of stupid, ridiculous idea that earns you a shiny bit of metal with a ribbon on it.
"Blackeyes," I shouted over the endless roar of gunfire, "I need your grenades."
Blackeyes gave me a perplexed look.
"Now!" I shouted.
Blackeyes nodded, unhooked her bandolier of grenades, and tossed it over to me. I tapped everyone I could reach for their grenades – Chunks, Jammy, Surt. Pockets whined about it until I told him that I'd have Surt shake his drekking grenades off of him if he didn't give them to me immediately. I crouched by Smiler, and asked for his grenades.
"What the drekk are you up to, Corporal?" He shouted, taking in the several bandoliers of grenades, and glowering at me.
"Being a grenadier, Smiler," I snapped at him. "You giving me your grenades or not?"
Smiler nodded, and handed me his bandolier.
I found Butcher working on Flatline and Blondie. Flatline's lower right arm was simply gone, ending in a clean stump at his elbow. Blondie was in a far worse state. The warp blast had stripped a chunk of his chest away. I saw the pale bone of his ribs and sternum poking through the raw red flesh of his chest muscle. Butcher had hooked a blood pack up to Blondie, and was holding the plastic packet between his teeth while he worked to bandage Flatline's stump. When I explained I wanted his grenades, Butcher turned his head to indicated his blood-crusted ears. Catching on, I pointed to the grenade bandolier, then pointed to myself. He shrugged, and straightened up a little so I could unclip them.
Trigger almost shot me point-blank in the gut when I nudged her, and only the fact that her clip had run dry saved me from ending up alongside Blondie and Flatline. Trigger swore, reloaded, pointed the smoking hellgun barrel at my head, asked why I wanted her stuff, and then demanded to know if I was working with the daemon to disarm us.
"I'm trying to blow the drekking thing up, you paranoid psycho!" I screamed at her, forgetting that things like 'logic' and 'reason' never work on Trigger.
Surprisingly, it was Thorpe that saved me from Trigger's, well, trigger. He thrust the gun barrel to one side, and towered over Trigger. His black cloak swirled around him, his bolt pistol smoked in the darkness of the hallway, his power sword glowing like the Emperor's fury made manifest. Even his moustache seemed to have swollen in gravitas. It hadn't struck me before how tall Thorpe was – he must have been at least on par with Surt, and almost as broad.
"Hand the grenades over, trooper," Thorpe said, in a voice that made my stomach twist in discomfort.
Trigger sullenly unclipped her bandolier, and dumped it on the floor. Thorpe stooped, picked up the bandolier, and passed it to me with a nod.
"Suffer not the daemon to live," Thorpe said in that same cold, hard voice. "Send it back to the pit it came from, Corporal."
The Giant Slug of Doom had added another three bodies by the time I was ready. Each devoured body was accompanied by that disgusting moan of satisfaction. Organs, muscle, and bone were squeezed together, packing over the wounds like scabs. In five minutes, it had practically undone all of our work. That being said, if my plan worked, then it wouldn't matter. The daemon was approaching another body. I had to move. I'd strung each bandolier's grenades together with det-cord, and handed the long, thin wires off to Blackeyes to rig up to a detonator. I shrugged off my webbing, and set the hellgun down. They would slow me down, but I felt uncomfortable without a weapon – naked, vulnerable. I'd carried a gun since I was a teen, down in the mine-hive's depths. To start with, it was largely for show – a kid playing at being a ganger. But later, and especially after joining the AM, it was a necessity.
It was only as I was preparing to run that I realised that the hallway had fallen silent. The daemon's heads still moaned and shrieked and cackled maniacally, but something was missing. I looked around, and saw that the whole platoon – or what was left of it – had stopped firing. They were all looking at me. Even Trigger – although that was because Smiler had clearly stomped over and snatched her hellgun out of her hands for the time being. I could feel the tension – the desire to shoot overridden, to act, to do something, no matter how useless it was. But, unruly as we are, for all our faults, for all the drekk that our 'honourable' allies might lay on us, we're drekking good at what we do. And nobody, except for Trigger, wanted to mess this moment up for me. And, it being Trigger, you can't take it personally. It's just the way she is.
There was nothing left for it. With half a dozen or so grenade bandoliers wrapped around me, I ran for the gory mess of the body closest to the daemon. I had no drekking idea if it would work, and if it didn't, I'd have wasted a substantial amount of ordinance on a gamble. I crouched over the body, and started strapping the bandoliers in place. I could feel the daemon shuffling closer. The wailing was getting louder, and louder. I kept my head down, ignoring the horrendous sight below the bandoliers, and focusing on what I was doing. My trembling hands found each clip, and secured the grenades in place across the gory body – I linked the clips through ribs, across the spine, bound its feet together with one, anywhere that I could find purchase. My broken hand, a screaming mess of pain by this point, was almost useless, so I had to brace one end of the clip in that hand and the other end in with my good hand.
I kept my head down, even as the daemon shunted itself forward. Even when my hands slipped on the third clip three times, and jammed the end into my broken bones, I cursed and swore and screamed in frustration, but I kept my head down. My head was pounding; blood dripped down my nose and into my mouth. My hands slipped and slid as they became slick with gore. My eyes stung from tears, and I blinked furiously to clear them, working through a blurry half-vision as the tears dripped into my goggles. My fatigues were damp and clammy with cold sweat and piss. I don't remember when I pissed myself; and I'm not ashamed that it happened. I was terrified.
Each time I clipped a bandolier in place, I contemplated running back. Each time, a large part of me hoped that one, two, three, or four would be enough; but I wanted to be sure. I needed to be sure. So, I stayed, even as I felt the daemon coming closer, the wailing of its heads almost deafening from the few metres between us. I stayed even when I saw the body twitch, and realised that the trooper – whoever it had been – was still alive. I was turning one of my own – a friend I didn't know – into a suicide bomb. I always wonder if I should have put them out of their misery. There wouldn't have been time, but I still wonder. As the last bandolier was clipped into place, I felt hands grasping me, plucking at my fatigues, and finally I gave in: I looked up, and screamed.
The face in front of me was twisted and distorted beyond all imagining. The skin was pulled tightly over the skull, giving the leering eyes a deathly, baleful stare. At the same time, long, fleshy jowls hung from a tiny, puckered mouth that had been squeezed between a greasy amalgamation of organs on one side, and lumps of bone on the other. At that moment more than ever, I regretted not taking a weapon. I couldn't move. I just stared back at that face – a face that I recognised, in spite of everything the daemon had done to it; and one that had no right to be there.
The person that face belonged to was back on Weissar, and the last time I'd seen her, she had a bloody, gaping hole in the middle of her forehead. Smoke curled up around it. There was no sound from the witnesses. They looked on, mouths open, trying to comprehend what they'd just witnessed. Murder didn't happen this high up in, and certainly not to one of the great families. Except, it had happened. The evidence was staring them in the face. A cracked, dark mirror of the real Weissar – the gangs, the violence, the death – had been held up to them. I stared into the face of the woman that gave birth to me, and then threw me into the pits to fend for myself.
"I forgive you," a voice said. It was a strange approximation of a human voice, vaguely feminine, but there was something that didn't feel right with it – a bitter aftertaste. The face's lips didn't move, and neither did I. I crouched, rooted to the spot, simply unable to comprehend what was going on. "Come, be with me now. We can be together. Isn't that what you always wanted, Rosa? To be with me? To be with your real mother – your real family?"
I heard shouting behind me. It was hard to make out. The words bounced around my mind like a penetrator round in a chimera, turning everything into mush and mess. I stared back at the face. I didn't even try to blink away the tears that flowed freely down my face, and filled my goggles.
"I killed you," I whispered.
The hand-cannon's grip was soaked with the sweat of anticipation. The gun slid from my hand, its work done. It thudded onto the plush carpet. The fat slug had blown out the back of her skull, the fragments shattering a half-dozen glass behind her and inflicting some minor injuries. Blood pooled around her head, staining the carpet red. It had a pattern of zig-zagging black and white lines – like teeth, I remember thinking. I stood, watching the blood saturate the carpet, blurring the lines between the black and white. I watched until the enforcers came for me.
"And I forgive you for that," the voice said, its tone trying to sound soothing. "It was understandable."
"Smokey!"
A clear voice cut through the fog. A muscle in my face twitched as I tried to look around.
"Stay here. Stay with me."
The voice sounded desperate now. Blood on the carpet. My legs began to regain some feeling. Blood pooling around her head. I took a single, shaking step backwards. Brains scattered from her head like gelatinous confetti. Another step. The gun falling from my hand. My feet tripped and skittered like a newborn puppy, all sense of co-ordination lost. Staring - just staring - at that lifeless body, at the woman that I hadn't been good enough for.
"Come back, Rosa," the daemon snarled at me. It twisted my mother's face into a leering grimace. "Get back here, you little bitch, and get what you deserve for killing me. I'm going to keep you alive while I tear out every one of your organs, so you'll feel the same pain I did when my own daughter murdered me!"
I stumbled backwards, the daemon screaming, cursing, begging, pleading, bargaining. I was promised salvation, redemption, glory, honour, wealth, lovers, even the Golden Throne and Terra itself. Halfway back to the others, I collided with someone I couldn't see or hear. I felt arms dragging me off the floor. I was into the crook of an arm like a baby. My whole body felt limp and spent. Every part of me ached. I heard a thundering explosion – one like a hand-cannon going off in a crowded, up-hive restaurant, as someone took justified revenge.