Blood Sacrifice Read online

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  Cover

  Blood Sacrifice – Peter McLean

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Genevieve Undead’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Blood Sacrifice

  by Peter McLean

  After Baphomet, he was redeployed. There’s no respite in the Astra Militarum, no end to the killing. Not ever.

  Death and death and death, the unofficial mantra of the Imperial Guard.

  Corporal Cully looked out over the relentless grey of the out-habs, and sighed. Behind him, the main spine of Hive Lemegeton reared majestically into the clouds, but Hive World Voltoth remained one of the most depressing places he had ever seen in his life.

  Below the chunk of broken ferrocrete he stood on, One Section dug latrine pits. He caught Steeleye looking up at him. The master sniper’s bulbous, augmetic eye glinted metallically in the polluted twilight before she turned away. Above them, a huge hololithic display flickered with daily production targets, hourly quotas, shift rotation patterns.

  ‘Toil in the Emperor’s name is a virtue!’ the public address system announced. ‘Sixteen cubic tons of further production required by nineteen hundred hours. Toil in the Emperor’s name is a virtue!’

  Cully glanced at his chrono. It was seventeen forty-five, local time. On the manufactorum wall was a mural showing handsome, square-jawed Imperial men and women marching proudly off to war in starched uniforms with freshly stamped lasguns over their shoulders. The caption below read: ‘Their lives are in YOUR hands.’

  Hive worlds like Voltoth kept the war machine turning. Cully knew that. Boots, uniforms, flak armour, ration packs. It all had to come from somewhere. The forge worlds turned out tanks and troop ships – but you couldn’t wear those, or eat them. The hives kept the Imperium alive.

  They had been there for three months, digging in. Cully was utterly sick of the place. The waiting was the worst. Give him something to kill and he’d be as good as he got, but the waiting was wearing Cully’s nerves to ragged ends.

  Away behind him a klaxon blew three long blasts, signifying shift change at another manufactorum. The line of workers waiting to enter stretched the length of the street, all of them bent and hungry-looking in their thin, grey work smocks.

  Great doors banged open and the workers trudged inside in double file as the manufactorum excreted the previous shift from another set. From inside, Cully could hear the ceaseless chatter of the power looms.

  ‘Notice of production quota increase,’ the public address system blared. ‘Overseers to your stations. Toil in the Emperor’s name is a virtue!’

  Cully shuddered. This life was exactly what he had hoped to avoid in the Astra Militarum.

  He was aware of Steeleye climbing up the ferrocrete to join him, an entrenching tool over her shoulder where in any sane world her long-las would have been.

  She paused at the top to spit snot out of the ragged hole where her nose had been before an ork had bitten her face off two years ago, on Vardan IV. That done, she turned to survey the industrial wasteland of smoking manufactoria and crumbling, impoverished dwellings that made up the out-habs.

  ‘Shithole,’ she pronounced it. ‘I almost miss Vardan Four. At least the jungle was green.’

  ‘It’s better than Baphomet,’ Cully said quietly.

  Steeleye shrugged. ‘Wasn’t there,’ she said.

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Steeleye said. ‘I know you were the only survivor. The sergeant…’

  ‘Leave it, Steeleye,’ Cully said.

  He scratched at the scar on the back of his left forearm, the crude aquila he had carved into his raw flesh with his own bayonet in a moment of post-traumatic madness.

  The sergeant, indeed. All Cully’s woes could be condensed into those two words.

  The sergeant.

  Sergeant Rachain, Cully’s oldest and only real friend, and the best mentor he’d ever had. Cully had killed him himself, on Baphomet. He knew he would never be able to forgive himself for that.

  The sergeant.

  Sergeant Kallin, Cully’s new leader. Kallin was a tough veteran but he had a bayonet so far up his arse he could taste steel when he coughed. Kallin, who had the best sniper in the entire Reslian 45th digging latrine pits because paragraph six hundred and ninety-four, clause sixteen, sub-clause eleven in the regulations, or whatever it bloody was, declared that fair rotation of fatigue duties applied to everyone regardless of enlisted rank, merit, or having better sodding things to do.

  Cully and Kallin, it was fair to say, were never going to get along.

  ‘Why are we digging in this far behind the perimeter?’ Steeleye asked. ‘There’s miles of out-habs beyond where we’re preparing a front line.’

  ‘Too many miles,’ Cully said, ‘and not enough of us to hold them. The main spire is the important thing. You know, where the rich folk live. We just need to hold that, and we need to be seen to be holding it. They’re starting to panic already up there, so I hear.’

  ‘All those workers,’ Steeleye said, gesturing at the manufactoria. ‘Knowing their homes will be abandoned to the enemy when the ork warband arrives, knowing they’re going to lose everything. Working anyway, day in and day out.’

  Cully shrugged.

  ‘They want to eat,’ he said. ‘No production, no rations.’

  Steeleye wiped her oozing, ragged snout on the back of her already crusty sleeve.

  ‘Makes you appreciate life in the Guard,’ she said.

  Cully just nodded.

  ‘We’re the lucky ones,’ he said.

  He meant it, but he swallowed all the same. Orks again. They had faced orks on Vardan IV. For three long, grinding years of misery they had fought the greenskins in the reeking jungles, and left over two million of their own dead or missing in action. Now they would face them again.

  We’re the Imperial Guard. Dying is what we’re for. Cully had used to tell the new boots that, back on Vardan IV, to spook them. He had thought it was funny at the time, right up until he realised that it was true.

  Dying is what soldiers are for.

  Death and death and death.

  Cully sat down and lit a lho-stick, resting his back on the wall behind him. It was painted with the mural of a proud Guardsman rearing up to hurl a grenade at an unseen enemy. The caption above read: ‘Emperor help me if this is a dud.’ Below, the ever-repeated slogan: ‘His life is in YOUR hands.’

  There are only so many times a man can push his luck, Cully reflected. Only so many battles he can survive. Cully had been in the Guard for nearly twenty years, and he wondered just how much luck he had left.

  Being forced to kill Rachain had all but finished him, he knew. With the older man at his side Cully had felt invincible. A survivor. An avatar of the Imperial war machine. Without him, he was just a soldier like any other, and he knew how long they lived.

  ‘We should be grateful,’ Steeleye said after a moment. ‘Without these people, their work, we couldn’t fight.’

  ‘I know,’ Cully said.

  I was good with a power loom. Remember me.

  Cully blinked back a tear and took a drag of his lho. Memories of Baphomet were the last thing he wanted just now. Memories of anything. All Cully wanted was something to kill, something to hurt to take his own pain away if only for a little while.

  ‘Corporal!’ an all-too familiar voice barked. ‘Put that out! No smoking on duty.’

  Cully mashed his lho angrily into the ground and made himself stand up and salute, aware of Steeleye doing the s
ame beside him.

  ‘Yes, sergeant,’ Cully said.

  Sergeant Kallin glared at them both, his regulation helmet perfectly set atop his regulation haircut, and his regulation blue eyes shining bright beneath its brim.

  ‘Why aren’t you working, trooper?’ he demanded.

  ‘Latrines are done,’ Steeleye growled. ‘Sergeant.’

  ‘Then find something else to do,’ Kallin snapped. ‘Corporal, detail your section to inspect the ammunition dump. I want every power pack and grenade logged in triplicate and checked against the Munitorum manifest. Jump to it! The enemy makes work for idle hands.’

  Kallin turned on his heel and marched away at a regulation pace as the public address system once again intoned that toil in the Emperor’s name was a virtue.

  ‘His family own a garment manufactorum back home, so I heard,’ Steeleye said.

  ‘You don’t say,’ Cully said.

  At twenty-one hundred hours local they were rotated off fatigues at last and sent back to camp. D Company’s billet was a series of empty storage sheds that crouched in the filth beside the great engines that drove the hive’s eastern spire elevators. It was never quiet, and the air reeked of promethium exhaust night and day.

  Cully took his helmet off and tossed it onto his bunk, and sat down with a sigh.

  ‘Inspect the ammunition dump, Corporal Cully,’ he muttered. ‘Log it in triplicate, Corporal Cully. Paint the engine grease white, Corporal Cully. The sergeant makes work for idle hands, Corporal Cully.’

  He lit a lho and blew smoke angrily into the tin cup of thick, oily recaff he had snagged on his way through the camp. Everyone else said the stuff was horrible, but Cully had found a new appreciation for Guard-issue rations since Baphomet. A man who has known thirst and starvation is grateful for any sustenance, he supposed.

  ‘Talking to yourself again, Cully?’ Corporal Lopata asked.

  He was a huge man, prodigiously strong, and regimental legend had it that he had been an enforcer for some big-time ganger back home before he joined the Guard. It was said he had killed an ork in single combat on Vardan IV. Cully wouldn’t have believed that if Varus hadn’t been there to see it with her own eyes, but she had and he trusted the veteran scout more than anyone in D Company except for Steeleye, so he supposed it must be true.

  ‘Don’t mind me, Lopata,’ Cully said. ‘Just having a grumble about sergeants. That’s a corporal’s prerogative, that is.’

  Lopata snorted and lit a lho of his own. He had good ones, Cully noticed, not the ration-issue smokes that were as likely as not to fall apart in your hand before you could even light them. Lopata always seemed to have good kit, and if you wanted some extra sacra or more smokes or whatever then he was the man to go and see about it. Every regiment had its black market man and has done since armies were invented. Cully knew that and he turned a blind eye to it. Kallin wouldn’t, though.

  ‘Don’t flash those around where the sergeant can see,’ he cautioned. ‘He’s the sort to have you up in front of the commissar for racketeering.’

  Lopata laughed.

  ‘They’re only lhos,’ he said, but he tucked the pack away inside his uniform all the same.

  ‘Where did you get those, anyway? You didn’t have any left when we were on the troop ship.’

  ‘I met a guy,’ Lopata said, with an expressive shrug.

  ‘You always meet a guy,’ Cully said. ‘Nice skill to have.’

  Lopata looked at the other corporal for a moment, his brow furrowing in thought.

  ‘You want in on something?’ he asked after a moment.

  Cully coughed to cover his surprise. He and Lopata had been in different platoons back on Vardan IV and he had only vaguely known the man then, and even since they had been in the same unit they hadn’t had more than a professional relationship.

  ‘Maybe,’ Cully said, after a moment. ‘Why me?’

  ‘You don’t like Kallin any more than I do,’ Lopata said. ‘People like him are bad for business, but I reckon old Cully knows which way is up.’

  ‘What is it?’ Cully asked.

  ‘Just a pickup,’ Lopata said. ‘This guy I met, he’s got a drop coming down right on the edge of the out-habs. He wants something collecting and bringing back to the spire, that’s all, but the out-habs aren’t too safe at the moment with all the security pulled back behind the new front line. He saw all these bored soldiers hanging around and reckoned we might like an early payday. Varus is already in, and I’m talking to Steeleye and a couple of the others as well. It’s easy money, Cully.’

  ‘We’d have to be bloody careful,’ Cully said. ‘Make sure we get there and back while we’re scheduled to be off watch. The commissar is all over the attendance rolls since Sharrik and Ells deserted. I’m not risking her bolter up my arse however good a payday it is.’

  Sharrik and Ells, that had been bad. They were both veterans, tough men who had been through Vardan IV the same as the rest of them. Why they had chosen to desert shortly after the regiment made planetfall on Voltoth was a mystery, but Cully supposed that if you were going to cut and run then a hive world was the place to do it. It would be easy enough to lose yourself amongst the vast population of a hive, but how they thought they were going to live after that was beyond him. Still, they weren’t from his section so it wasn’t his problem, and thank the Emperor for small mercies.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Lopata assured him. ‘We’re making the pickup from an abandoned community medicae facility in quadrant nine. That’s only five miles out, we can easily do it in an overnight watch even on foot.’

  Cully nodded. They would never get away with ‘borrowing’ a halftrack when they were off watch, not in Kallin’s platoon, and Lopata had obviously realised that. He ground his lho out on the dirty rockcrete floor and nodded.

  It was better than the endless waiting, and the relentless horror of his memories.

  ‘Yeah, we can do that,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re in?’

  ‘I’m in,’ Cully said.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  Dying is what we’re for.

  It was two days until their next overnight off watch, and Cully spent that time counting things that didn’t need to be counted and making his men polish things that didn’t need to be polished and got almost instantly dirty again anyway. His simmering resentment continued to grow, and every time he so much as saw Sergeant Kallin he grew more convinced he had been right to throw his lot in with Lopata. This make-work was all just so pointless; he might as well use the time for himself while he had the chance. Emperor knew he couldn’t rest at nights anyway. Nightmares of Baphomet tortured him through every sleep cycle, until he was glad to wake and work just to put an end to them. The orks would be there soon enough, and then there would be no time for anything but killing and dying.

  They met at the edge of camp at twenty-two hundred, him and Lopata, Steeleye and Varus and the four other men Lopata had talked into coming with them. They wore full combat battledress, and all of them had their weapons with them. Steeleye had her specially customised hotshot long-las over her shoulder, where it should be, and Strongarm had his bandolier of grenades. Lopata raised an eyebrow at that.

  ‘We’re not going into battle, man,’ he said.

  Strongarm just shrugged. ‘Better safe than sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever,’ Lopata muttered. ‘Right, we’ve got eight hours until we’re due back on watch, local standard. Let’s get marching.’

  Cully fell in beside his fellow corporal as they headed out of camp and along the cracked ferrocrete road that led into the out-habs. There was a Guard checkpoint there, but in their full battledress they looked so much like an official patrol that they were waved through with no questions.

  Discipline was getting lax, Cully thought.

  If Kallin had been half th
e sergeant that Rachain had been then he’d have been worrying about things like that, not whether the latrines had been polished today, but he wasn’t and that was all there was to it. Cully lazily saluted the trooper on watch and made a mental note to kick his arse when they got back.

  The streets were shadowed, but it never really got dark on a hive world. The manufactoria ran around the clock, and the glow from the millions of windows in the towering main spire illuminated the out-habs for miles in every direction. The Reslian 45th were infantry to the core, and their marching pace ate up the five miles to quadrant nine in barely an hour.

  They gathered under a buzzing orange street light, just a caged bulb bolted to a crumbling wall adorned with a mural of a hard-eyed Imperial Guardswoman, her stern face unrealistically devoid of scars.

  The caption above read: ‘She fights the enemies of the Imperium. Don’t let her fight alone!’

  Below, a pitted brass arrow pointed towards a long-abandoned tithing station with the words ‘Join the Astra Militarum today’ spray-painted over in blood-red graffiti with ‘To Valgaast, nine miles.’

  Steeleye looked up at the mural and slowly shook her ruined, lopsided head. The medicae corps had put her back together again as best they could, back on Vardan IV, but her skull had been half crushed and her eyes torn out along with her nose, and there was only so much that could be done with augmetics and synth-skin.

  Varus sneered at the mural for a moment, but said nothing.

  The bezel in Steeleye’s single augmetic eye clicked as it rotated to switch to night vision and scan the deepening shadows. This close to the edge of the out-habs the light was bad, and some of the narrow alleys between the long rows of hab blocks could have concealed anything.

  ‘Which way?’ Cully asked.

  Lopata consulted his map and compass for a moment before pointing east.

  ‘Down there,’ he said. ‘Look for an old medicae facility. Varus, take the point.’

  The veteran scout nodded and slipped away into the shadows, silent as a ghost. They followed a moment later, lasguns in their hands. There was an unspoken understanding between them that gangers weren’t necessarily the most trustworthy of the citizens of the Imperium, and also that the weapons and equipment they carried had a significant black market value. It was best to be careful.