Diary

It is the end of the first day with these so-called Water Dogs and I am surprised at how big they are. First of all, they are one group of many that live in these sewers, working together to spring ambushes and the like on the orks. The Water Dogs consist of not only Osprey's one hundred fighters, but another hundred and fifty or so of their families who live with them. They got their name from the flooded tunnel they have to trek through and their groundwater supply.

The 89th and I were shown around by a talkative man named Angelwing. He must be one of those priest-caste types by his name. He talks a lot about the Emperor and Erson and spiritual stuff. The 89th is going to be spread out amongst Osprey's fighters. I am told my authority over them will now be reduced to keeping a headcount. Hah! And I was supposed to lead them.

For now, my boys and me are working menial chores around their lair. This is a blessing, there's a lot of young women with no husbands with the Water Dogs.

The Water Dogs are sending a mission up to the surface. Apparently half the guys they sent up on their last mission are overdue. Lystartro and two squads of the 112th are going with them.

Cav closed his diary before Angelwing could look at it. He somehow didn't feel comfortable with having this pasty stranger reading his words. Cav's fingers were still wrinkled from all that washing he did but while the rest of the 89th ate their evening meal, Cav found he was neither hungry nor talkative.

"So you're a hill clan?" asked Angelwing, "a blessed defender?"

"Yes," Cav replied. "Joined to kill orks." He thought proudly of the ones he had slain. "Am I the only one around here?"

"Hill clan members are rare out here. Most of them are with the Temple Guards. They're another resistance group near the holy mountain. Don't see them much," Angelwing replied. He had a certain slur in his voice that made Cav give a low estimation of his intelligence.

"So there are people with the hill clans out here?" asked Cav, hopeful one of them might be family. "Well, if there's any others who stop by, tell them to steer away from Kins, the commissar."

…

Rockrete and plasteel, rockrete and plasteel. Everywhere Lystartro rested his dirty eyes, he saw rockrete and plasteel, lying, discarded in ugly heaping piles of monstrous ruins that only vaguely resembled the city it had once been. If he looked hard, he could see streets, roadways and familiar types of building under that veil of urban desecration. These dirty fighters were like the man version of these wrecked places. But unlike the city, they carried within them a warrior's spirit that Lystartro admired, despite their humble appearance. They were so weak, but fighting for this urban moonscape.

Lystartro and his command squad crouched down with Osprey's squad of Water Dogs. Short-range vox-links were kept so their sweep could be plausible. Amongst this hell of urban waste, these low-quality vox sets were unreliable, but they got the job done, more or less.

"They should be here," Osprey said at last, when they arrived at a nondescript plaza. Lystartro looked around at the ruins, which formed a clean square around what looked to have once been a nice looking city square. Perhaps, in ages past, lovers came here to take a break from the grind of daily life? Now, it was a dusty ruin of…of…

Yet more rockrete and steel.

"Alright, we should search this place high and low for my men. They know to come here if they get cut off. If they're not here, they might have not made it back," Osprey whispered, directing his men with hand gestures. Orders were sent through. In the ruin around them, squads of Water Dogs moved in to search the ruins for their missing comrades.

"They might be dead," Lystartro replied. It was his men's job to cover the Water Dogs. They knew the city and this odd city square refuge point and could search it most reliably. "Can't you let go? This is the greenskin's backyard." Osprey looked fiercely at him.

"No, this is Urbanis 1, my home," he replied. "If there's a chance my men got away from that fight and are hiding out here, I'll take it." Lystartro passed his orders around to his other squads out there in the ruins. They were to go in quick and light, eyes up and guns raised, but obey the Water Dogs. "Just watch and learn," he said to each of his sergeants. He was loathe to give that last order. He hoped he would make up for it by having a unit that fought better than Osprey's.

So ten 112th Guardsmen and ten Water Dogs ducked through the dusty hallways of the ruins around the great square. Here and there, Lystartro spotted some fresh, clean-looking item lying amid the ruin. A pile of kitchenware here, a shiny wrench over there. As they make their way through a long room with a high ceiling, he spotted a flawless wooden chair against the wall, waiting patiently for a user the way it did before the war.

"Sir…" clicked Osprey's vox-set. Osprey gave the signal to halt and lifted the little device to his ear. Lystartro smiled at the crude contraption. Osprey was forced to use it and still he fought on instead of lying down. Another tribute to the legendary stupidity of man.

"Movement to the north, by the warehouses," Osprey recited. Lystartro sent the news to his other squads. The whole expedition held its position and waited. "Damn it, orks," Osprey sighed in exhaustion. He lowered his set and let it hang from his back. "We might have to do some shooting."

"Great. I hate all this damn silence," Lystartro huffed back. A dirty-faced young woman stuck out her tongue at him.

"You thick army boys are such meatheads. No, we can't get into a shoot with the greens," she blurted. Lystartro considered punching her, but knew he shouldn't. It wasn't because she was a woman: Rynn's World taught him that women needed no special protection from violence. It was because of Osprey. He couldn't afford tension between them.

"She is a little right, you know? The orks will be drawn to shooting. I want to see what's for dinner tonight and I don't want my chance ruined when half the city gets dumped on us," Lystartro said to Osprey.

"I'm ordering a…" his vox-set burst to life. He raised it to his ear. This time, Lystartro heard nothing from it, though Osprey seemed to be listening to someone. "It's them, they've been found. They're all dead," Osprey sighed faintly. "Emperor damn…" he lowered his set. "Lystartro, pull your men back and Yueka here can take you back to the kennel." The woman with the sharp tongue crossed her arms and looked at Lystartro as if to say "you belong to me." He didn't have to ask Osprey where he was going.

"If it's so damned important that you see their dead bodies then I'm hauling myself over there too," Lystartro answered. "I think it'll help stick the two of us together more. Sentimental nonsense, you know?" Osprey gave a ghostly grin and looked at Yueka.

"Lead the rest of the offworlders to the kennel. I'm borrowing their captain for a sec," he said.

A moment later, the order was given to pull back while Lystartro, Osprey and eight other Water Dogs went to behold the fate of the lost squad.

…

During the liberation of Rynn's World, Lystartro helped retake many small settlements overrun by orks during the first wave of the invasion. He'd been younger then, but no less hard. Scenes of sad, pillages homesteads became a daily experience for him as they drove the greenskin horde back into the mountains. Some were burned to nothing and some were untouched ghost towns, still stocked with the personal affects that the orks had not touched. Lystartro remembered seeing picts of families in abandoned houses, sometimes with cradles, children's toys and piles of clothes in drawers. These settlements were always barren of their original inhabitants. They could instead be found underneath it, in the waste pits the orks dug.

Lystartro had helped unearth a dozen of these mass graves. They were filled with the bones of thousands of villagers who had fallen prey to orkish appetites. Remembering the faces from those picts, both Lystartro's nightmares and imagination were tortured with violent visions of how he imagined those families turned from productive citizens into piles of bones. He asked himself unanswerable questions such as how much they had suffered, how long the orks had kept them alive, or if they were afraid. He felt sympathy for them, but he never showed it. He kept such feelings on the inside, lest they hinder his duties.

Imperial propaganda loved to show orks off as being comically crude, illogical hooligans with poor verbal skills (Lystartro didn't believe reports of orks speaking low gothic) and silly accents. Unfortunately, this meant too many of the men he sometimes met in his campaigns thought the orks were funny or delightfully primitive parodies of human culture. If there was some joke to what the greenskins did to people, Lystartro wasn't laughing.

He thought of heaping skulls out of waste pits and sorting through piles of ashes looking for signs of human remains as he looked over the bombed-out room. He thought of staring, mummified faces mounted as trophies on orkish vehicles and banners.

"Orks didn't do this," were the first words Lystartro spoke. They were the first words anyone spoke. Osprey nodded.

"Starving, desperate bandits," he muttered.

The men in the missing squad lay dead in a row, hands tied neatly behind their backs, eyes blindfolded. They hadn't been mutilated, but their weapons and ammunition were all missing. They had been shot in the head, execution style while they lay on the ground.

"They might still be around," one man from the two Water Dog squads warned. There were twenty-one men present and that gave Lystartro some confidence that they were indeed not.

"What are you doing?" asked Lystartro as Osprey and six of his men walked around each of the bodies.

"We are giving them our thanks for their service," Osprey whispered, making the aquilla sign to them. "Their duty is done." Lystartro knew how dangerous useless gestures like this could potentially be in the field. They needed time. Orks were coming.

"Move it on, we must hurry," Lystartro said. A few of the other Water Dogs, thankfully, agreed. Unfortunately, Osprey looked reluctant.

"This is a duty…" he began.

"The good captain is right in his assessment."

Lystartro jumped at the voice. He turned to see Mhal walking out of the shadows like a cat. He was here too? Why didn't Mhal tell them? Typical gloryboy behavior, trying to ignore protocol, thinking independence from the command chain will get them a shot at heroics.

"What in the name of the great Golden Throne are you out here for sergeant?" demanded Lystartro. "And where are your men?"

"They are punishing the greenskins. I came here to inspect these men," Mhal replied. He pushed through the Water Dogs and reached the corpses. He drew his sword just as Osprey finished walking around the last one. With the tip of his blade, he nudged aside a dead man's torn shirt.

"That's really something," Lystartro said to himself.

The man's back was a mess of thin scratch marks and burns: the signs of torture. These men had been interrogated before they were killed. A few of the Water Dogs cursed in anger, swearing impossible vengeance.

"Bandits don't torture, they just rob…" Lystartro looked up at Osprey. "Is this new?" Osprey looked at Lystartro, then slightly looked at Mhal.

"There's some crazy bandits around here," he replied. Listening to his reply was like tasting poison in his food. Something was definitely amiss. Lystartro looked to Mhal Dannit and felt sure he was looking at the true leader of the Water Dogs.

"Why abandon your men, sergeant?" asked Lystartro.

"Don't question my methods, captain."

"That's sir…"

"Look around you!" Mhal swung his arms to the walls. "This is not an imperial headquarters or a parade ground. This is a remote wilderness of warfare. Polished Imperial Guard formalities do not hold weight out here where there are no courts nor firing squads." The men around him gave no support to the captain. All the Water Dogs seemed to silently agree with the strange gloryboy sergeant.

"Empeor curse the bloody colonel for hitching me up with…" Lystartro snorted under his breath. He was about to ask if they could return to the Water Dog's lair when artillery shook the air.

"We've waited too damned long," one man cried.

"Let's go!"

"Alright," Osprey cried, "come dogs, back to the kennel and some chow." He took the fighters one way while Mhal ran the other way: north. Lystartro followed Osprey and privately hoped Mhal would be killed fighting the orks. Of course, given the old captain's luck, the sergeant would likely come back unhurt.