A/N: Thanks for the reviews, everyone, glad you guys like this!
I ask the commissar what to do next and she frowns, no trace of humor left in her face.
"You follow your orders and keep your mouth shut, is that simple enough for you?"
"Sure is, ma'am." Seems things are simple once again, I just do what I'm told and leave the thinking to thinkers… It's the natural order of things, really, thinkers think, killers kill and if anyone ask, it's the other one's fault.
"Are you combat ready?" The question is directed at the three of us, but only I answer.
"Yes, ma'am, got more work for us?"
She nods and off we go, back to the trucks. I'm not sure how this all fits together, the stronghold, the train, the skull and now this new job, deep into the northern mountains and their maze of caverns, cliffs and canyons, but, as I said earlier, I'm a killer, not a thinker.
The mortar is still in the lead truck, but whatever we lifted off the sixty-sixth's corpses is gone. Ferenzky says they took it and everything that could possibly have belonged to their dead when they came for me, meaning the Legion lost its whole supply of las-weapons, flak armors and decent rations. The colonel is not pleased.
It would seem Plato and Ferenzky are once again part of my squad, as the commissar has them sit with us in the truck, along with a goat-like beastman, a scatter-gun totting packmaster two heads smaller than I am, and his 'pack', another goat, a girl with cat ears, a tail and tiger stripes, and a bull.
I mean, a massive black bipedal beef with horns, knees that bend the wrong way and hooves instead of feet… The truck groans as he climbs in and he goes to sit next to me, his musky smell giving me a headache already, not to mention the thick tendril of foamy saliva dripping past his bovine lips.
"Frak off, t-bone," I give him a hard glare and he freezes, "you stay away from me you mutant piece of trash and I won't sell you to the local chop shop, we clear?"
The beast's round dark eyes flick from me to his packmaster with incomprehension, but the goat-man, sat right next to the cabin, barely acknowledge the incident, so the cow looks back at me, then to its hooves and finally decides to sit on the opposite end of the tuck, his hooves hanging out the rear.
Ferenzky and Plato exchange a fugitive glance when they think I'm not looking and even Angley scowls at me. None of them says a word, though, and we take off in silence.
Nothing looks more like a stretch of desert than ten thousand other stretches of desert, even asteroid craters look the same!
The bull's stench gets dragged away in the wind, but the goats and cat girl are further ahead on the seats and their salty animal smell is blown straight on me. I'll never get used to beastmen. Convicts, expatriates, free thinkers, mad killers, xeno lovers, that I can accept, they're scum like me, they're here because of what they did, but mutants, beastmen in particular, have no place here, they're not crazed killers and would have been normal folks if it weren't for chaos tainting them at birth.
Those who actually are mad killers are just feral beasts, meaning no matter what, they're unreliable in combat and, given their hygiene and intellect, make for poor company outside combat. They're using up space in our truck that could have been used by actual legionnaires.
I'm not the only one to think that way, a lot of us pure humans burn off all of our body hairs every week, to ensure we look nothing like those animals.
Only reason I don't just shoot all of them and dump their bodies in the nearest crater is because it's against regulation and the commissar hasn't ordered me to do it… Yet.
A bump rattles the truck and my gaze drifts to the bull. Still there. Guess I was hoping he'd fallen off.
The terrain changes radically as we near the mountain chain and its multiple tiny volcanoes. Solidified lava dots the landscape here like so many black shards of glass, or corrupted ice in a field of gray snow.
Ferenzky and Angley have been talking about genestealers since we left. Will's a thinker, so is our commissar, no surprise they get along so well.
"You mean, they reproduce with females of any species?! That's sick!" Ferenzky sounds disgusted, which amuses the Commissar and she replies with dark humor.
"Indeed, only truly evil creatures would reproduce by rape, this is why we have the moral high ground…"
If she weren't a commissar, I'd have thought that sentence to be sarcasm and, therefore, heresy…
"But they're linked to Tyranids, no?" How Plato knows anything about Tyranids is one of the many mysteries that now fill my life, and I don't even bother asking him, though it does get me thinking whether I really know the man that well.
"They are. They serve as a recon force and their presence on a planet heralds the arrival of a hive fleet."
Ferenzky's tired eyes widen, "You mean… They, the 'nids, they are coming here? Soon?"
The cat girl giggles and leans back in her seat, apparently not meant to accommodate tail owners. "They're already here from the looks of it."
I hate to admit it, but kitty has a point. The genestealers have been here since before I joined the legion, they decimated the population decades ago… "They've been here long," I point out, a flash of inspiration making its way in my skull, "Why haven't they called the fleet yet?"
Angley looks at the goats, then the cat and finally the cow, apparently, she likes what she sees, because she proceeds to reveal what must be classified knowledge. "For the same reason they cannot stand sunlight."
"And why can't they stand sunlight?" Asks Will, his face twisted into a perplexed grimace.
"I haven't the slightest-"
Everything is still, sound dies as Plato roars something. A shadow glides over us from left to right, completely silent as well. A Vulture gunship. A strong gush of wind pushes against my back smoothly, almost delicately, sending Ferenzky, Plato, the cat and I across the truck and onto the opposite seats and their occupants. I almost slam into the commissar, but the truck tilts to the right just in time and I fly over her head to crash into the volcanic ashes.
There's nothing but ashes, rhythmic pounding of drums and the whistle of a cheap kettle for what seems like the better part of an hour. The drums are my pulse and only three heartbeats separate my fall with the moment I roll around on my back.
The truck has not finished flipping to its side yet, but our attackers, men in black armors rappelling down Valkyrie transports, are already seeking cover to open fire on the rest of our convoy.
I shove myself up and stumble behind a black shard sixteen meters right of the wreck. Lasgun fire crackles against my cover, coming from a rocky piton a bit beyond the wreck, and I return the favor by shooting my rifle blindly over the shard.
The commissar's bolt pistol barks twice, somewhere ahead, but that doesn't mean she's still alive, if I were Plato or Ferenzky, I would have no qualms about looting the weapon off her corpse.
In Plato's case, I can't guarantee he wouldn't shoot her for it.
The fire on my position intensifies and the glass slowly melts back into lava. A soldier, thinking himself clever, tries to flank me from the right, ahead of the convoy, where the road narrows to a canyon and the cliff descends in a steep slope, but I'm leaning around the right corner of my cover to spot some targets when he does and that puts him right in my peripheral vision.
He survives the first burst, even though it's perfectly centered on his heart, but is halfway down the slope and my shots knock him off balance, so his return fire is sloppy.
My situation is not optimal either, his friends are showering me with lasers now and molten glass gets sprayed all over my armor. The next volley perforates the man's neck and melts his jawbones. That guy won't flank anyone anymore.
"Use the mortar!" Someone ahead yells. Ferenzky. Good idea, and the bad guys hear him too, because they leave me well alone after that, too busy focusing fire on whoever gets near those phosphorous shells.
I could take pot shots at whatever exposed bodyparts I can spot up on that piton, but the jaw-less guy gurgling in the dirt thirty paces to my right just gave me an idea.
The piton is an extension of the canyon, a few meters lower, maybe, if I can climb that slope unnoticed, I'll get a nice shot at them from up there, and someone helpfully left a shining new lasgun along with a few grenades for me to use right in my way.
Fighting against the legion must be a pain in the arse, you never know what level of training and what equipment the other guy has, though you can take a safe guess and say both are skak.
I'd love to request covering fire, but that would ruin the element of surprise, so off we go, boots kicking off ask and molten glass. I bend and snatch the corpse's weapon without slowing down, the dead man's arm gets caught in the bandoleer, so I grab the front of his helmet and drag the whole corpse up with me.
Two frags, one incendiary and four concussion charges, along with a slim laspistol and the bullpup lascarbine. I can make that work. First, I use the carbine's high quality scope to see what I'm up against.
Six Guardsmen, not even shock troopers, and they haven't suffered any losses yet...
Of course they haven't, the sixty-sixth took away our energy… wait. No, loyal Guardsmen would never… What? Attack a bunch of mutants and convicts to fulfil their mission?
Shame they had to be stupid about it, a few improvised explosives along the road would have ended this fight before it began… Unless they don't want to kill everyone. That would explain a lot.
Well, they did suffer one casualty and there's going to be a lot more in a moment. First, I chuck two concussion grenades in their direction, the first missed, so I had to waste another, then, as they are distracted, I put a few laser beams in the air, but overshoot by quite a lot. No coriolis effect with laser weapons, silly me.
Their retaliation fire forces me down to the point I'm kissing the ashes as ionised air sizzles all over the place.
Well, that didn't go as planned. The skin of my shoulder and neck crackles like steak after a while, it feels like a very bad sunburn, but they have yet to land a solid hit.
There's a loud pop and the shooting stops. A second later, the smell of burnt meat and chemical fire reaches my nostrils.
The whole piton was covered in phosphorous fire, the six soldiers the occupied it now nothing but smoking statues, holding their pose in death.
Throne, one of them is trying to move… Her carapace armor apparently kept the heat low enough so her internal organs won't cook. I know it's a she because of her breastplate, anything else, her face, her skin, it's all melted into a scrotum-like mask.
Her left eye burst out from the heat, the right one is intact, but hanging in her face, help only by the optical nerve.
The scope relays those details with flawless accuracy and I squeeze a single shot into the survivor's skull. It's not mercy, not kindness, it's pragmatism, a survivor is too much trouble, especially one in that bad a shape, shooting her now, in the heat of battle, will spare me the headache later on, when it's morally questionable to do it.
The corpse at my side has a knife with leather scabbard, which I take for myself, along with his identification tags and ammunition.
I could have dragged the whole body down with me, but then some of the new guys would have whined about burial and battle honor, respect for our fellow human.
It's stupid, we're not human, we're legion, it's our job to be monsters, to stab our enemy's head on a pike and feast on their flesh!
The commissar has her gun to the bull's head when I reach the wreckage of our truck and that pauses whatever I had been thinking about.
"This coward refused to fight." She explains, as if she owes me an explanation.
The beast is on his knees, smacking himself in the face whining "Bad beastman, beastman bad! No kill for the Emperor, no do good, bad, never be good! Say sorry, but no kill, bad!"
Pathetic… What's she waiting for? Just shoot the mutant and be done with it! Never seen a commissar this conservative with their ammo…
"Does he even have a weapon?" Will's tone is smug… No, angry. Didn't know Ferenzky was a mutant lover. I glance his way, only to see the cat girl standing next to him. She's the one that fired the mortar, judging by the burnt fur on her hands.
Angley lowers her pistol to give the bull a once over. He's wearing brown uniform trousers, meant for Ogryns, and nothing else. Nope, no weapon. What kind of idiot goes to battle unarmed?
"Beastman too big, beastman sorry," He sputters, tears flowing from his bovine eyes, "Lagun small, lagun break when beastman hold."
Angley's gaze settles on me, more specifically, on the massive frak-off autogun hanging off my back.
"Corporal." Her tone is cold.
So is mine, "Commissar?" She gives me an annoyed glance and I fake incomprehension, "Need something, boss?"
A good commissar would have shot me. She growls, her eyes narrowing to two slits, and finally turns to the cow. "Can you clear the road for us…" She trails off, but the beast is too stupid to understand what she wants, so she clarifies, "What's your name?"
It looks at me like a schola student afraid he's going to give the wrong answer. What the frak does it want? Help figuring out its name?
"T-Bone, miss." It spouts, proudly, before looking at me with such demanding hope I can do nothing but nod. You'd think I just gave him a free pass to the town's brothel…
How can anything remotely human be that stupid?