Author's Note: In a move that will surprise everyone, I am back! Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. Reports of heavy school workloads and a day job were not exaggerated. To illustrate, I wrote 53 pages of essays last term alone, which took a lot of time, and more importantly creative energy. Just getting back to a headspace where I could write again was a struggle. But while I may drag things out, I won't quit! The fanfiction will continue as long as I have a few readers left.
Vraks Prime, 2.38 AVY:
How to describe the way the life faded from the eyes of a dying man? D-2389-45 was an engineer, not a poet, and he did not have the words. Only observations. This man writhed with every twist of the bayonet in his gut; his eyes were crazed and bloodshot, from a toxic cocktail of combat-stims. In this last, agonized struggle, a fight to survive an already fatal wound, the mutated growths on the side of his face pulsed with blood.
After another instant the heretic was dead. Those crazed eyes became inert spheres nestled in cooling flesh, no more alive than anything else in this tunnel. It had taken just two seconds to skewer him and three more to hold him dying against the wall. D-45 pulled back, letting the fresh corpse slide off the bayonet he wielded like a dagger, and turned left to face the remaining mob of cultists.
Flashlights and las-beams provided most of the illumination at hand. A scattering of lamps, hung crudely over the heretic corridor, left a steady, sickly background glow. D-45 stood with his five-man squad near the mouth of a breach, where a Hades-pattern drill had punched into a key artery of the enemy tunnel complex; though the operation was supposed to have been a surprise, it appeared that these heretics had heard it coming, and come to meet the intruders in force. That complicated things—but war was complicated.
"First Squad! Left!" shouted the watchmaster, C-89. He wore a bulky power cell on his back, feeding a hellgun with which he sent spears of red light cracking down the tunnel."A-16 and D-45, I want you in the lead!"
"Affirmative!" said A-16. He put a hand on D-45's shoulder guard and pushed him forward, as if he couldn't be relied upon to advance on his own. D-45 jabbed an elbow at his squadmate to break him off. The five engineers of First Squad pivoted left, facing a horde several times their number, while neighboring Second Squad handled the tighter confines on the right.
Why fight in this dreadful place? To kill heretics and die for the Emperor was reason enough, but D-45 knew that this attack served a crucial strategic purpose. While most fighting was on Vraks' desolate surface, it was the subterranean depths, the silent and trackless abyss of rock stretching forever downwards, that added a dimension no less vital than the skies overhead. He who controlled the ground could bypass the static, bloody trenchline, as the traitor militia had tried to do with this tunnel complex. It was rare for a guardsman to try to see the big picture—in fact, he wasn't supposed to—but D-45's greatest defect was that he had imagination.
The leftward tunnel continued straight for almost a hundred meters. Little knots of heretics charged and fired, a few taking up positions at the mouths of connecting passageways, or behind crates of provisions. The rest had no need for such luxuries as cover. Fully aware and furiously energized, they would put up more of a fight than the first few had, right out of the breach—the Kriegers had tossed in a flash grenade the moment they broke through, blinding or at least dazzling the troops massed on the other side.
Las-bolts and the muzzle flash of autoguns strobed down the corridor, every shot more than enough to kill. The watchmaster and two others held back, supporting, while A-16 went forward and crouched in a hollowed-out latrine; D-45 found meager shelter not far away, behind a wooden support beam. At least he was out of the enemy's line of sight, if he stood tall and kept his limbs close—back pressed against the unfinished rock of the tunnel wall; left arm against the beam, sword bayonet in hand; right arm wielding a semiautomatic shotgun, ideal for this kind of fighting.
Autogun bullets swarmed at him, blasting off splinters of wood. One made it all the way through, though by that point it had lost some energy, and bounced off his armor with no more force than a mediocre punch. He returned the favor, leaning around the corner and loosing a wall of lead from his shotgun. Recoil kicked the weapon back into his arm, hot metal pellets streaked through the darkness, and a heretic dropped backwards onto the body of a comrade. A second burst had the same effect. He did not fire a third, but retreated behind the beam, eroded as it was by so many potshots.
Across the tunnel, A-16 put up spirited resistance. Heretics had advanced almost to their line but were not yet across it. They were deterred largely by the forward troopers' shotguns, while the watchmaster and two others—actually, one other, A-56 had taken a bullet through an eyepiece—fired from crouching positions near the Hades drill. D-45 could see their expressionless helmets, grey-brown carapace armor coated in dust. They shot almost blindly into the murky tumult ahead. Second Squad was further in the distance, holding at bay the unknown dangers of the other flank. It looked like they'd already lost two of their people.
The gunfire from either side intensified, an indication that another surge of bodies was advancing into the fray. He had just the thing to thin them out. He unclipped a frag grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, tossed the grenade downrange with the pin swinging about. It landed out of sight and detonated a second earlier than he'd expected. Fragments of rock and most notably a piece of an arm flew from the explosion, and as the dust swirled there was a brief pause in the fighting.
The watchmaster did not hesitate to exploit the opportunity. He rose, and swept a hand forward towards the enemy.
"First Squad, let's move on up!"
D-45 almost broke from cover and joined—but then an autogun shot punched through the center of the watchmaster's chest plate, leaving a hole the size of a coin, the impact shaking a layer of dust from the surface of the armor. Carapace armor was supposed to prevent that, but it didn't always. The watchmaster slumped to the ground. Swarms of bullets had accomplished little, yet it only took one to kill a man.
A couple las-bolts, a second or so later, took down the remaining trooper next to the watchmaster. First Squad was down to two survivors. D-45 popped out and let loose another shotgun blast, to forestall the renewed attack; he and A-15 would hold the line, for however long they had left, until finally the heretics tore apart their mortal bodies and sent them to meet the Emperor.
Then: tramping boots, barely audible over the sounds of dying men. That would be the rest of the platoon coming up behind the Hades. Ten additional engineers to support the pathfinder team, though that would hardly be the end of it. High command was content to keep pouring men into this tunnel complex until they accomplished something. Another glorious day in the Korps.
D-45 looked over at A-15, assessing whether he would have to jump in again when his comrade ducked back into cover. Just a quick glance. But something caught his eye before he looked away: past the left edge of the rough-cut latrine alcove, less than a meter in the enemy's direction, an electrical cable snaked up the wall. It could be nothing, a primitive comms line or a power supply for the overhead lamps. But had he survived a year on the front by taking chances?
He followed the cable with his eye, resolving its course in spite of the gloom, in spite of the dust rapidly settling onto his lenses, and found the spot where it disappeared between two planks that haphazardly shored up the ceiling. The planks went on for a meter or so until they gave way to more rock. There would be a cavity up there, a fairly large one. Perfect for a bomb—maybe a claymore mine to shower down lethal shrapnel, or simple high explosives to bring down the roof. The enemy had predicted the breaching site well in advance, and prepared accordingly.
There was no longer any watchmaster to refer the problem to. His immediate superior lay dead on the ground. Third and Fourth Squads were just now starting to exit the breach, but it would take too long to explain the situation to them—and the perfect time to bring down the ceiling would be when they all came forward.
It would also be foolish to charge to the other side of the tunnel and attempt the job himself. He'd be killed as he crossed. The next task, then, was to delegate.
"A-15! Cut that wire in front of you!" D-45 shouted across the corridor. He underscored his point with a series of gestures, pointing at the cable, miming the collapse of the ceiling, making a scissoring motion with his fingers. A-15 took only a moment to figure it out.
"On it!"
He stepped cautiously out of the alcove, and D-45 emerged to cover him. Such as he could provide meaningful cover.
Some of the heretics were too far to reach effectively with the shotgun, and others simply showed no hesitation in the face of hostile fire. Nevertheless, he blasted. One shot, two shots—already he had spent more than half the rounds in the cylinder.
A-15 was at the wire. He gave D-45 a thumbs-up, and got to work, removing clippers from his belt. Heretics further down the tunnel took potshots at him.
There was, thankfully, the hail of fire from the Imperials behind D-45, some new troops—probably Third Squad—having taken up positions around where the watchmaster had fallen. Yet they were suffering, too—two of them had already fallen. It was a slaughterhouse in here and nobody was getting very far.
On the opposite wall, A-15 pressed close and raised the clippers to the detonator wire.
D-45 fired another shot in the direction of two approaching heretics: a tall, shirtless mutant and a shorter woman garbed in a patchwork of carapace plate, who had come up with the latest wave.
Only the tall one collapsed, his neck punctured. The woman continued relentlessly forward, seemingly unharmed, raising a blasphemously carved dagger as she closed on the exposed A-15. Was the armor that good? Or was she so hopped up on combat drugs that she was immune to pain? He thought he saw blood streaming from a joint in her armor, but it did not slow her down.
"Behind you!" D-45 shouted, not soon enough. She covered the short distance to A-15 and jammed the dagger into the gap between his neck and armor. The heretic had fought Kriegers before, clearly, because she knew exactly the right angle of attack. A-15 swung the cutters towards her, only to lose his grip and drop them as they collided with carapace plate.
D-45 did not shoot, for fear of killing his comrade as he grappled with the enemy, but the Kriegers of Third Squad further down the tunnel had no such compunctions. They blasted away—solid slugs this time, rather than scattered pellets. One shattered the top of the heretic's skull and sent a splatter of brains as high as the tunnel roof; she fell backwards, leaving the dagger lodged in A-15's neck, and he in turn slumped to the ground, blood pouring through his fingers as he clutched at the wound.
D-45 looked on. It was all on his shoulders, now. He had one more round in the chamber, and there was no time to reload—the mine could blow at any moment. With more Kriegers forcing their way in, now was the perfect time.
So, he ran. He did not admit fear to himself, but he was indeed afraid. When he was halfway across the tunnel he loosed an unaimed blast from his shotgun, then dropped it to the ground and unclipped the wire cutters from his belt.
The carabiner jammed. He lost precious seconds. But the cutter was free and in his hands by the time he reached the far wall. Next came a shuffle left, keeping a low profile to the enemy, and there it was—the wire.
The thing was secured by a series of hoops. A fairly thick bundle, on close inspection. But the cutters were designed for barbed wire and they would work perfectly here.
"What are you doing?" someone shouted, a Krieger from Third Squad. "You're standing in the way!"
D-45 carried on. No time to explain. He positioned the two blades around the cable.
A las-bolt passed a few centimeters from the back of his helmet, close enough to scorch an unarmored man. He flinched at the crack of ionized air. There were shots to the left of him, shots to the right of him, shots ahead and behind. The only saving grace was that the heretics seemed to be more focused on the main line of Imperials than a single loner. He only needed another—
Almost without thinking, he pressed the cutter blades together and severed the wire. The bottom end of the cut dropped about a centimeter and leaned to the side; the top hung where it had been. It was done, but there was no great change, no climactic triumph—not even the grace of a timely las-bolt to send him on his way to the Emperor.
Another near-miss. He could of course stay out here, and die for the Emperor soon enough, but with the job done, that was not as good as surviving to die more usefully at a later date. An engineer with his skills couldn't be expended quite so liberally as the trench troops.
D-45 grabbed A-15's shotgun off the ground, though he had little idea how many rounds remained in the chamber, then turned and ran to the rocky alcove, his comrade's previous shelter.
A moment of rest, crouching out of sight of the enemy. The alcove was of course the site of a crude latrine, mostly dried-out, but what little stench made it past his respirator did not bother him. What was a foul odor, against the thrill of survival? And there was a thrill. He'd been eager a moment ago to lay down his life for the Emperor, atoning for the shame of his traitorous ancestors, but inherited guilt could not always blot out the far older human instinct for survival.
Sometimes he put on an act. As for his faceless cohorts, billions strong, did they do the same? How many others did not quite fit the mold?
He mulled it over only for a short while. A few seconds or so, not that he had a stopwatch handy. The alcove was safe enough, and it appeared newly arrived Kriegers were already turning the battle—more voices, and more tramping boots, and the crack of many lasguns. A whole new platoon had come through the breach, probably regular Krieg troops to follow the engineers. They would not be as well equipped, or as experienced with tunnel fighting, but soldiers were soldiers. Enemy gunfire receded into the distance. They were fleeing, at last!
D-45 ventured out again. The tunnel was full of guardsmen, now, many of them charging in either direction to pursue the vanquished heretics, others massing among the corpses and other debris that littered the dusty ground near the Hades drill. There was a scattering of engineers alongside the ten-man squads who had come in to reinforce the breach-head. The rest of First Squad was, of course, cooling on the ground, but maybe half of the engineer platoon seemed to have survived.
He had no watchmaster to report to, so he searched for the lieutenant. A quick glance turned up nothing—though a corpse slumped over on the far side of the Hades may have been him—but he did find what he thought was Third Squad, with a surviving watchmaster. Krieg uniforms did have identifying insignia, but given the dim lighting and the sheer dirtiness of everything it was not always easy to tell.
He headed towards them. Most of the new troopers ignored this man who'd come from a hole in the wall, but the watchmaster did wave as he drew nearer.
"From First Squad?"
"Last one. This Third Squad?"
"Yes. Three of us left."
D-45 looked over the other two troopers, and was ever so slightly relieved to see, printed faintly on a shoulder pad, the number L-3837-71. Friends did not exist in the Death Korps, but this trooper was the closest approximation. He nodded at him, and L-71 nodded back.
"Our orders, sir?" D-45 said to the watchmaster.
"Captain wants us to stay here for the moment." With a tilt of his head he indicated an officer, standing nearby, with epaulettes on his shoulders and a gold design of an aquila on his breastplate. The man had a sword by his side, unsuitable for tunnel fighting but impressive nonetheless. "We have fulfilled our breaching role. The next task is to search out hidden entrances or mines—any avenues for the heretics to subvert us."
"I already found one of those."
"You have?"
D-45 pointed at the cut wire, and the boards holding up the ceiling above it. "I think they set up a mine overhead. I cut the wire before it could go off."
"You were the one doing something on the wall?" L-71 spoke up.
"Why didn't you tell anyone?" the watchmaster asked.
"It could have blown any second. There wasn't time."
"Very independent of you." That was no complement. "Let's take a look."
The watchmaster led Third Squad a short distance down the corridor, keeping to the side so that a stream of fresh troops could pass by. It was not quiet here by any means, but with the enemy in disarray and the front line pushed far back, the killzone had become just another tunnel. The breaching team had spilled so much blood for this territory, and now there were Kriegers walking all over it.
They stopped beneath the wooden planks. The watchmaster gestured upwards, and L-71 piled a few heretic corpses together, plus that of A-15, making an improvised platform. He climbed it and pried at the ceiling with a spade. Dust cascaded down in little swirls.
"Explosives?" asked the watchmaster.
"Yes." L-71 shone a pocket light into the gap. "Yes, all this could have sent our men in the trenches flying."
"The trenches are thirty meters up."
"Come take a look for yourself."
L-71 stepped down, and the watchmaster climbed the body pile, peered into the ceiling cavity, then called for the captain. The officer trotted over; they talked. This problem had been kicked successfully upstairs, and was out of D-45's hands, for now—he leaned against the wall, a respectful distance from the officers, grateful nobody was shooting at him. As the tension left his body he allowed a sigh.
"Come on, you didn't fight that hard," L-71 said, walking to join him, and stepping over a few more heretic corpses along the way. Dirt and blood caked his boots in equal measure.
"I'd think I've earned a break. My entire squad got killed back there."
"The lucky ones."
"By now they'll be before the Golden Throne, basking in the Emperor's light, and He will tell them they did a good job—that they are forgiven for everything. Can you imagine it?"
"The Emperor protects His loyal servants. We will join them, sometime very soon."
D-45 nodded. He inspected the cylinder of his shotgun—just one round left, out of eight—and loaded a few more cartridges from a pouch at his belt.
"I wonder if we'll get to keep our gas masks, when we rest in the Emperor's embrace."
"What would we do without them? You think we'd just wander around eternity, maskless, trying to identify our comrades by faces we have never seen? Might as well be naked. No, we'll have masks on, for sure."
Though they'd both been here around a year, he had no idea what L-71 looked like. The suits kept them supplied with water through a drinking tube, and at least on the front lines, food was a tasteless sludge delivered the same way, so there was rarely any reason to take them off. But the face beneath was irrelevant; all troopers had the only expression they needed, a weary frown written across their lenses and ventilators.
"You heard the rumor?" L-71 spoke up, after a short pause. The watchmaster and captain were still discussing the ceiling mine. Apparently the explosives there could be useful against heretics elsewhere in the tunnel complex, if they were removed carefully, so the engineers would need to get working again soon.
"This something you're supposed to know?"
L-71 shrugged. If D-45 was the dreamer, L-71 was the petty rebel, but their bond of nonconformity was no weaker for it. "The rumor is, we're leaving Vraks."
There was a brief flare-up down the tunnel—an inchoate screech, a shotgun blast muffled by flesh. D-45 raised his weapon, but relaxed when it became clear that it was some holdout instead of a determined counterattack.
"A retreat? Impossible. We're winning—if slowly."
"We are winning. But our regiment's at only half strength, so the Lord General's decided to separate us from the army and assign us elsewhere."
It was true that the 158th Siege Regiment had suffered staggering losses. Old-timers like him and L-71 had come through, but after the meatgrinder that was the recent, abortive offensive towards the Vraks Citadel, the average length of service was down to a couple weeks at most. Not even the industry of Krieg could keep pace with that kind of attrition.
"Where are we supposed to go, then? Better not be garrison duty."
"An agri-world. Numor, I think it's called. Under attack by an enemy nobody's seen before."
The galaxy was a vast place, with many dangers lurking outside the scattered watchfires of His domain, and sometimes more exotic foes appeared than the typical greenskins, tyranids, or heretic mobs. D-45 had never expected to live long enough to see any.
"What do we know about them?"
"Little, so far. They say they're humans, but not regular heretics—they're well-organized, with advanced weaponry and a fleet to rival our own."
Could it be? Scattered enclaves of heretics were one thing, but another human empire…
"Back over here!" shouted the watchmaster, waving. "We will dismantle the mine. Delicate work, but it's better than leaving a thousand kilos of fyceline sitting overhead. Let's get started!"
D-45 pushed off from the wall and headed over, L-71 close behind. As he walked he pondered the news. He wasn't supposed to be curious, but he was. He couldn't help but imagine a new planet, and a new enemy to face—some kind of false Imperium.
FAQs:
-Q: How long is this fic going to be? As long as it takes! Considering the scope of the story, I can't cram it into anything less than novel length. Given my schoolwork and my other writing projects I expect to keep hammering away for more than a year, at least.
-Q: What will be in the next chapter? The Inquisition! Bet you didn't expect that.
-Q: Will you ever update your other stories? Yes on "Hive," but can I offer no timetable. I may also return to "Gifts of the Blood God" now that I've figured out a decent ending. For the time being, though, False Imperium is the priority.
-Q: When are you going to post again? I'm not at a point where I can stick to a schedule yet, but it certainly won't be another six months. Check back in... three weeks? Two?
Until next time!
