Baphomet by Night – Peter McLean Page 2

  He turned to the ammunition dump, metal crates stacked with lasgun power packs. The way some of those idiots had been shooting last night, their weapons were probably down to half charge or less already. He’d get them to reload now, he decided, in case it happened again. Hopefully the incursion had just been a couple of enemy stragglers trying their luck, but you never knew.

  He was leaving the shack when he found Puke Boy – Trooper Morran now – heading the other way.

  ‘Morran,’ Cully said. ‘Ammo check.’

  Morran glanced at the gauge on his lasgun.

  ‘Thirty per cent, corporal.’

  ‘That’s what you get for shooting full auto at nothing,’ Cully snapped at him. ‘Get in there and get a reload.’

  Morran saluted and did as he was told. He’d have to take the squad through weapons discipline all over again, Cully realised. Whatever they’d learned in basic had clearly gone straight out of their heads as soon as the shooting started. He was thinking about that when Morran came back out of the supply shack.

  ‘Uh, corporal?’ Morran said hesitantly. ‘Sorry, I… I must be doing this wrong. It doesn’t fit.’

  ‘What doesn’t fit, Morran?’ Cully said.

  He turned to see Morran holding his lasgun in one hand and a fresh power pack in the other, a frown of utter confusion on his young face. Cully sighed.

  ‘What you’re holding in your left hand is an M-thirty-five Short-pattern lasgun, Trooper Morran, the same as everyone else’s. What you have in your right hand is a power pack for an M-thirty-six. Of course it doesn’t fit. Go and get the right size and try again.’

  ‘But they’re all the same, corporal,’ Morran said.

  Cully swallowed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought maybe I had the wrong size, so I checked the other crates. All the power packs in there are like this one.’

  ‘No,’ Cully said. ‘Oh no, no. Don’t do this to me, Morran.’

  He shouldered past the boy and back into the stench of the supply shack. All the ammo crates were open, where Morran had been desperately searching for something to fit his weapon. They had hundreds of power packs there, as they had been promised by the Departmento Munitorum, and all of them were Cadian Kantrael M36 pattern.

  Cully ran back to the command post and shoved the door open without knocking. Delaney was still cursing at Squawk, and the field vox was still producing nothing but howls of static. Rachain turned and gave Cully a look.

  ‘We have got a major problem,’ Cully said.

  ‘I expect you to bring me solutions, not problems, corporal,’ Delaney snapped.

  ‘What is it?’ Rachain asked.

  ‘The ammo,’ Cully said, ignoring the lieutenant completely. ‘It’s the wrong pattern. All of it.’

  ‘No,’ Rachain said, and thumped his hand down on the folding table. ‘No, that can’t be right.’

  Cully shrugged. ‘Well it is, and half the rations are tainted too. We’ll starve before we’re scheduled to be relieved, and with the way the troops were firing earlier we’ve barely got enough ammo to defend ourselves if those cultists come back again.’

  ‘I’ll call in a supply drop from HQ,’ Delaney announced. ‘Request reinforcements, too, in case there are more of them out there. Maybe a tank.’

  Rachain looked pointedly at the field vox.

  ‘Any luck, Squawk?’

  The vox operator shook his head.

  ‘It’s almost seven hundred miles to HQ, and the atmospherics are hopeless,’ he said. ‘We won’t get a signal out there on this set.’

  Delaney licked his lips nervously. He was quite obviously out of his depth and he knew it.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said at last. ‘Your recommendation?’

  Rachain sighed. ‘The vox is useless, and no one’s walking seven hundred miles in a hurry.’

  ‘Is there any way we can boost the vox signal?’ Jemsin asked.

  ‘Not without an uplink mast, which we haven’t got,’ Squawk said. ‘Even if we had, I don’t think this set has got the power we’d need to cut through the interference.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Cully said. ‘I saw an uplink mast from the drop-ship. It’s in the middle of the city somewhere. Wouldn’t that have a hardwired master vox system attached to it, something that would be able to get a signal out?’

  ‘It should have,’ Squawk said, ‘but do you even know where it is? In case you hadn’t noticed it’s pitch black out there.’

  ‘Shut up, Squawk,’ Rachain said. ‘Cully, you’re a genius. I’ll lead Jemsin’s squad myself, with your lot holding the camp, and–’

  ‘No,’ Delaney interrupted him. ‘I will. You don’t have the rank to order reinforcements, and I have. It has to be me who speaks to HQ. I’m leaving you in command of the camp until I return.’

  ‘Sir,’ Rachain said, and saluted the officer.

  Maybe you’re not such a coward after all, Cully thought.

  Delaney left an hour later, leading Jemsin and her squad into the darkness. Squawk had gone with the lieutenant, his heavy vox-set on his back. Cully stood at the perimeter and watched them go, following the beams of their lamp packs until they were out of sight. He could hear them over the short-range vox, Jemsin’s voice coming through the bead in his ear as she gave curt, efficient orders.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ he whispered.

  He sighed and turned back to the camp.

  Morran was there, and Kallek, and another lad called Vorn. Vorn had found a pack of caff that hadn’t gone bad, and he was brewing for the squad over a camp stove. Cully gratefully accepted a cup.

  ‘Are we going to be all right, corporal?’ Morran asked. ‘I mean, what if there’s hundreds of them out there?’

  ‘Of course there aren’t hundreds of them,’ Cully said. ‘We won the battle here, Morran. There may be one or two pockets of stragglers like the ones who attacked us, but no more than that. We’ll be fine.’

  He glanced at Morran’s lasgun with its thirty per cent charge, and prayed that he was right.

  It was getting colder, and the wind was picking up. The heavy banks of cloud overhead shifted, allowing dim grey light to filter through. Not enough to see by, not by a long way, but enough to make out vague shapes in the darkness. Somehow that was worse.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a hand of cards.’

  Delaney’s team had been gone for perhaps an hour when the shooting started.

  Cully’s vox-bead exploded with shouting, the sound of lasguns and the long, ugly bark of stubbers.

  ‘You hear something?’ Kallek asked, lifting her head into the wind.

  Cully was the only one there wearing an earpiece.

  ‘Fall back!’ That was Delaney, sounding urgent. ‘Jemsin, where are you?’

  ‘No,’ Cully said.

  Someone screamed over the vox, and there was a loud rolling explosion that sounded like a whole clutch of frag grenades going off at once. It was audible even from the camp.

  ‘I heard that,’ Vorn said.

  ‘Sit still and finish the game,’ Cully said. ‘I need to talk to the sergeant about something.’

  He found Rachain sitting in the command post, head in his hands as he too listened to what was playing out over his vox-bead.

  ‘It sounds bad,’ Cully said, and the sergeant nodded.

  ‘Where’s the–’

  More shooting over the vox. A confused babble of voices, raised in panic.

  ‘I’m out of ammo!’

  ‘There’s too many of–’

  Stubber fire, sounding like it was coming from two directions.

  ‘The corporal’s down! Repeat, the–’

  The roar of an explosion.

  ‘Help me!’

  The vox cut out suddenly.

  Cully l
ooked up and met Rachain’s bleak stare. Outside, a cold wind blew.

  Rachain addressed the troops shortly afterwards.

  ‘I have reason to believe that the lieutenant and Two Squad have met heavy resistance in the city,’ he announced. ‘We lost vox contact some fifteen minutes ago. I don’t think we can depend on them to make it through, or to come back.’

  He paused to let that sink in. Cully watched his squad, the nine troopers that were all they had left now apart from Sawbones. Morran looked terrified. Kallek was crying again, but that had long since stopped being funny. Everything had.

  ‘This is now very serious,’ Rachain went on. ‘I want a full supply audit, right now, and ammunition level reports from each of you. Get to it.’

  Cully saluted and detailed Vorn and another lad, Dolven, to the supply shack.

  ‘Pile all the fouled food outside the shack,’ he told them. ‘We’ll burn it, later.’

  They went to do as he said, but an hour later they were back.

  ‘It’s hopeless, corporal,’ Vorn said. ‘It’s nearly all bad. Everything. Even the last of the caff has turned to slime. What’s wrong with it?’

  Cully stared at him.

  ‘Chaos is what’s wrong with it, lad,’ he said. ‘This whole place is still tainted.’

  He went to report to Rachain, who just shook his head.

  ‘I’m not convinced this war is as won as we think it is,’ the sergeant said, ‘but we haven’t got enough ammo to do anything about it. Jemsin’s squad took the best of what we had with them. Cully… I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to go and find them. Take three men, salvage what you can.’

  Cully saluted and went. He chose Morran, Kallek and Vorn, and led them out of the camp the way Delaney’s party had gone.

  He had Rachain’s pocket auspex at least, otherwise they’d never have found them. He followed the fast-fading heat trail down a darkened street then into a service road between two huge, shattered warehouses, and there the trail went cold. He motioned his three troopers to be still while he fiddled with the device in his hand, trying to increase the gain.

  ‘Emperor’s sake, doesn’t anything work properly?’ Morran muttered.

  ‘Don’t you go taking His name in vain,’ Cully snapped. ‘The Emperor protects, boy, you remember that. When there’s nothing standing between you and the Archenemy but flak armour and the aquila, you’ll find your faith soon enough, trust me.’

  ‘Yes, corporal.’

  A moment later the auspex found Two Squad’s heat trail again, and they crossed another access road and stepped through a gate into what had once been a plaza of some sort. That was where Delaney’s squad had been ambushed.

  Cully played the light of his lamp pack slowly over the scene of horror that greeted them. The men and women of Two Squad had been disembowelled, their corpses crucified on the chainlink fence that surrounded the plaza. Squawk’s field vox was embedded in his empty chest cavity, the handset rammed into his mouth. Delaney’s head was mounted on a spike sticking out of a fencepost.

  There was a wet splatter as Morran threw up on the ground.

  Only Jemsin had been left alone. She was lying dead with a wall at her back, her lasgun still clutched in her cold hands. There were five dead cultists sprawled on the ground around her.

  ‘You fought well, corporal,’ Cully whispered.

  They saluted their dead, the four of them, and that was all they could do.

  ‘Collect up their power packs, all of them,’ Cully said. ‘Grenades too, if they’ve got any left. Bayonets, rations, anything worth having. Get to it.’

  While the team set to the grisly work at hand, Cully inspected the bodies of the cultists. Their comrades had taken their stubbers, but otherwise left them where they had fallen. Cully turned one over with the end of his lasgun, unwilling to touch the foul corpse.

  It was a man, heavy-set and middle-aged by the looks of him, perhaps a foreman in a manufactory before his corruption by the Dark Gods. It was hard to tell, what with the armoured welding mask that was crudely sutured across his face.

  He wore a thick rubberised worksuit that had been converted into rudimentary armour, but left his burly arms bare. Cully squinted, looking closer at what he had initially taken to be a wound on the back of the man’s left forearm. It wasn’t, he saw now, or at least not one caused by fighting. The man had carved a mark of Chaos into his own flesh, a vile sigil of the unclean that made Cully feel sick just to look at it. He shuddered and moved on, and saw that the other bodies all bore the same mark in the same place.

  ‘Done, corporal,’ Kallek said, and he turned.

  They had six power packs between them, with bayonets, canteens and ration packs to match, and four remaining frag grenades.

  ‘There were more of them than that,’ Cully said.

  ‘Well, not everyone’s here,’ Vorn said. ‘Either they’re still alive or, uh, the enemy took some of the bodies with them.’

  Cully looked at the plaza, at Jemsin’s bullet-riddled corpse and Delaney’s head on its spike, and shook his head.

  ‘They aren’t still alive,’ he said quietly. ‘Come on, back to the camp.’

  They were half way across a service road when a burst of stub fire blew Vorn’s head apart.

  Cully threw himself into cover behind a pile of rubble and dragged Kallek down after him. Morran was still on the far side of the street, cowering behind the wreckage of a groundcar and firing wildly at the building the shots had come from. An upstairs window lit with a muzzle flash as the stubber opened up again, making Morran dive under the car for shelter.

  Kallek was shooting now, her full-auto fire peppering the rockcrete around the window and achieving nothing.

  ‘Hold fire!’ Cully hissed at her. ‘We haven’t got ammo to burn.’ He looked up at the window, judging the angle, then touched Kallek’s arm. ‘On three, open up again. Cover me.’

  She nodded. ‘One, two… three!’ Her lasgun cracked furiously once more and Cully reared up from cover and hurled one of the four precious grenades. It flew perfectly through the window and detonated with a roar that threw smoke and rubble and bits of bodies out into the street.

  Cully ducked back into cover, counting. After twenty he began to relax.

  ‘Clear,’ he called, and stood up.

  Morran wriggled out from under the groundcar and pushed his helmet back to wipe sweat from his forehead despite the cold of the street.

  ‘Stay here,’ Cully said, and crossed the street and ducked into the building.

  He found a broken staircase, and in a room above it the mangled bodies of two cultists and the remains of a tripod-mounted heavy stubber, twisted and ruined by the explosion. There was nothing left worth looting.

  Back in the street, Kallek was saying the Benediction of the Emperor over Vorn. Cully waited for her to finish then led his remaining team back to the camp.

  No one spoke on the way.

  ‘A man’s dead for three grenades and half a dozen mostly spent power packs,’ Cully snarled at Rachain.

  ‘And six ration packs,’ the sergeant said. ‘We’ll need every one of them, you mark my words. Everything in the supply shack has turned to filth now, and there’s nothing edible to hunt or gather in a place like this. The city is ruins, and the other direction is just poisonous wasteland for as far as I dared send anyone to look.’

  Cully grunted. It was night by then, as far as they could tell anyway, and he had the squad sleeping in shifts while others kept guard at the camp perimeter. They didn’t send out any more patrols.

  ‘I know,’ Cully said. ‘Sorry, sarge. I didn’t mean to sound like I was questioning your orders.’

  Rachain put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘We have to get a message to HQ,’ he said. ‘Delaney was right about that. There’s no way this is just stragglers, not after
what you saw in that plaza. Beleth still belongs to Chaos. The general needs to send a regiment at least, proper combat troops to clear it out. If we don’t find a way to tell them, they’ll be sending in civilians in a couple of months to start rebuilding. It’ll be a massacre. It’s our duty as Guardsmen to get that message out or die trying.’

  Cully nodded.

  ‘It’s that or starve anyway,’ he said, ‘and I’d rather die fighting.’

  ‘Good man,’ the sergeant said. ‘Come the morning we’re abandoning the camp and blasting our way through to that uplink station whatever it takes.’

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Cully said, and went to get some sleep while he could.

  The next morning they headed out: Rachain, Cully, Sawbones, Kallek, Morran and the other six remaining troopers. They had eaten the last of their rations that morning, washed down with brackish water that had sent Trooper Harlan running to the latrine afterwards. Limardi was complaining about her guts too, but there was nothing to be done about that.

  ‘Set all weapons to single shot and keep them there,’ Rachain said. ‘Our priority is the uplink station. We’re not fighting if we can avoid it, but if we’re attacked, make every shot count.’

  There were murmurs of assent, the crunch of boots on loose rubble the only other sound as the squad moved slowly into Beleth. All lamp packs were off at Rachain’s order, and he was leading them in almost total darkness by his auspex alone. They had only a vague idea of which direction the uplink station lay in, and no desire to draw attention to themselves with lights.

  Cully did what any Guardsman should: he hitched up his pack, said a prayer to the Emperor, and marched into the darkness.

  They had been in Beleth for two days, lost in the dark. Harlan was dead, killed in the first ambush, and Morran was leaning on Cinkosky and dragging a leg that had been almost shredded by stubber fire. Sawbones had done what he could, but he couldn’t work miracles.