Deathwing (9 page)

Sal fell silent. Nipper looked down at her. She was pale and drawn. Already lines of pain and fatigue were etched into her face. She stumbled and almost fell but Nipper supported her. She did not ask to rest. Nipper guessed that, like the rest of them, she knew she would be left behind.

S
IX HOURS INTO
their march they found the body. It was that of a man. He had been left stretched out in the glistening coils of a dreamspider’s web. His mask had been torn away and fungus emerged through his mouth, nostrils and other orifices. Nipper thought it was a ghastly way to die – lungs filled and insides eaten away by parasitic fungus. Yet the man was smiling. The narcotic strands of the web had done their work. He could see the dreamspider retreating from its decomposing prey as they approached.

Krask looked at the body, a haunted look on his face.

‘What’s wrong?’ Borski asked.

‘Look at the man’s clothing, sir. He’s wearing green bark-cloth and carrying a spore-harvesting pouch. He’s one of our loyalist scouts.’

‘So?’ Borski said.

Nipper understood. ‘A man like that knows the forest. He wouldn’t blunder into a dreamspider web.’

‘Someone put him there?’ Borski looked thoughtful.

‘Rebel woodsrunners. The natives believe that the web of a dreamspider ensnares the soul. It’s the worst form of death in their book. We lost a man up near Spook Mountain last spring. They’d done the same thing.’

‘This means rebels had already passed our outpost line before their big push,’ Borski snapped. ‘Weapons at the ready. Be wary of ambush!’

Without any great enthusiasm the guards began to check their weapons. Gingerly they passed the web.

For some time afterwards, as he and Sal limped down the trail, Nipper could feel the dead man’s calm, ecstatic eyes staring at his back.

N
IPPER SURVEYED THE
surrounding woods fearfully, looking for signs of the rebel woodsrunners. He knew that if they were concealed his chances were slim. The natives wore chameleoline suits and were expert at blending in with the terrain. He paused for a minute and placed the stimm injector into the conduit on his filter mask.

There was a hiss of gas and he breathed deep. Artificial energy surged through him and he felt suddenly strong and alert, as if he could count the leaves on all the nearby trees. He knew the feeling would not last and in the end would leave him feeling worse, but at the moment he needed some encouragement to trudge on.

He offered the injector to Sal but she shook her head. Perhaps it interferes with her powers, he thought.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I’d go bug-crazy if I mixed that stuff with witch-spore. It’s bad enough having to try and tune everybody out all the time but when you’re on stimm it’s like everything is so loud it hurts.’

Nipper looked at her. For the first time he considered that her gift might also be a curse. He had always imagined what fun it would be to be able to listen in on other people’s thoughts, what advantages he could gain from it, how god-like it must feel to have that power. He had never considered that it might have disadvantages as well.

Sal smiled knowingly at him. He felt a brief flash of resentment. Damned spy, he thought. She shook her head and looked away.

Almost at once he was sorry. She had been a good friend to him. It was just that he had never seen her power so active before. She seemed to be reading him all the time. It was as if the proximity of death had tripped a switch within her, turning her power up to full. It was disturbing for him but he decided he could live with it. He squeezed her shoulder.

‘Sorry,’ he said but she did not reply. He noticed that her eyes were closed and she was once more in trance. Her eyes snapped open. Nipper could see panic in them.

‘They’re out there,’ she said. ‘East and west, about twenty of them. They’re running parallel to us.’

Overhead the restless movement of branches had stopped. The tree-swingers were gone.

‘C
OMMISSAR, SHOULD WE
stop?’ enquired Krask. ‘We could make a stand.’Borski turned and glared into the jungle, keen fanatic eyes searching. ‘What are they waiting for?’

Krask shrugged. ‘Maybe for us to tire or make camp. Maybe there’s something ahead that we don’t know about. Best be wary.’

‘I doubt if we could surprise them,’ Borski said. ‘Best that we continue southward as swiftly as possible. We have our orders.’

‘Commissar, Truk would like to fight. Truk will wait for enemy. Cover others.’

Borski looked at him. ‘The Emperor appreciates your bravery, ogryn. But that will not be necessary.’

‘We’ll see action soon enough,’ Mak muttered.

Nipper examined the nearby trees carefully but could see no sign of the enemy. He was not reassured. He had known men to pass within two metres of rebel scouts who had killed them and they had never noticed their killers. He cast an uneasy glance at the sky. Up there was another invisible threat that was just as deadly.

By now the
Divine Retribution
would be in position, awaiting merely the command to fire. He checked his wrist chrono. Ten hours to go.

G
LYN DIED FIRST
. A hail of magnetically accelerated shuriken ripped through his body.

Nipper saw a dozen cuts appear on Truk. The ogryn looked around bemused, as if he did not really feel any pain. He was searching for the source of the attack.

Nipper flung Sal to one side, then threw himself flat into the hollow of the mainbranch they had been following. He peered around but could see no sign of the enemy.

He knew shuriken catapults were perfect for jungle warfare. They accelerated their razor-edged weapons to a speed where they could penetrate body-armour. They were rapid-firing and silent. All rebel scouts carried them.

Nipper lay quiet, feeling his flesh crawl, expecting at any minute to be shredded by their hidden assailants.

‘Nipper,’ Sal said. ‘That tree fork fifty metres south-west, about five metres up.’

He stared at where she directed. He thought he saw something just as he heard Hunt scream. The cry was cut off by a horrid gurgling sound, as if blood clogged Hunt’s throat.

Now Nipper could just make out the outlines of a humanoid form. It was almost invisible, so perfectly did its cham-cloth suit blend into the surrounding green.

Sweat rolled down Nipper’s face. He made himself take careful aim at the target, all the time fighting to hold down the fear that the rebel was drawing a bead on him.

He opened fire, praying to the Emperor that his aim was true. He saw a line of fire blacken the branches he had aimed at. He heard a scream of intolerable pain and it seemed for one obscene moment as if the tree was screaming. Then something fell from the bole onto the carpet moss below. For a second it was conspicuous, a green body on the brown forest floor, but then it seemed to vanish as its suit did its work.

Nipper looked at Sal. ‘Where are the rest?’

She concentrated. ‘They seem to have pulled back out of range. I think it was a lone sniper. Hunt and Glyn are dead. I felt them die.’

Her face was white and she seemed close to tears. Nipper was truly glad that he was not a psyker. It’s bad enough watching comrades die but feeling it from the inside must be dreadful, he thought. There was a void inside him, a vacuum. He had known the two men for most of his life. Now they were gone. He shook his head.

He noticed how drawn Sal looked. A tick twitched far back in her jaw. Her eyes were wild and staring. He wondered how much more of this she could take. Wearily he checked his chrono. Eight and a half hours left.

‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘We’ll make it.’

He wished he sounded more convincing.

O
NE FOOT IN
front of the other, Nipper thought. And again. And again. It was physically painful for him to move now. It was as if a great weight had been attached to each foot and he had to swing it to move. He no longer watched the forest for rebel scouts. He was past caring. There were times when he would have welcomed being cut down by enemy fire. It would have put him out of his misery.

The forest had become a green hell. His companions were damned souls on their way to purgatory. The light hurt his eyes and made the trees seem like looming gigantic daemons. It was if the forest had taken on a malevolent sentience and mocked them. It sneered at the tiny people who crawled across its body like ants.

Well, you’ll get yours, Nipper thought feverishly. You won’t laugh at us when the
Divine Retribution
blasts you right out of existence.

Beside him Sal was a constant drag, pulling at him like the gravity of a black hole, slowing his steps, draining his energy. Her eyes were half closed and her movements were stiff. Nipper felt that if she had not been leaning against him she would have fallen right off the main branch. By the Emperor, he would probably fall over himself if she had not been there.

From behind him he could hear Trak singing in a deep tuneless bass. He seemed to be repeating the same words over and over again, occasionally changing the order in which they came. The monotony worked on Nipper’s frayed psyche. It was exquisite torture. Ahead of them Mak and Colquan bickered like two drunk men. Their arguments had the relentless circularity of people too weary to think. They were reduced to making statements that they had said before. Their words had become mantras as leeched of meaning as Trak’s song.

‘We should wait and ambush those daemon-loving scum-suckers,’ said Mak, flexing his metallic fingers.

‘Naw, we should push on back to Zone Amber before the bombardment, otherwise we’ll all fry.’

‘Look, if Damian’s little buddies get us, we won’t care about the bombardment. We’ll all be dead anyway.’

There was an edge of hysteria to Colquan’s voice. ‘We’ve got to move. That way we can keep ahead of them.’

‘They know the terrain. They’re natives. We’ll never outran them.’

They seemed to be about to come to blows.

‘Silence,’ said Borski in a hoarse rasping whisper that cut through all the other noise. ‘Such bickering is unseemly among the Emperor’s chosen troops. You are a disgrace to the uniform.’

Both Мак and Colquan stiffened and pulled themselves up straight. They said nothing but nodded shamefaced and began to march with renewed vigour.

Six hours, thought Nipper. Let them pass quickly. All I want is an end to this. He stumbled and both he and Sal fell. It was nearly a minute before they could get up again.

T
HEY CAME TO
a vast open space between the nation-trees. All around the forest was burnt. Nipper looked down. For a moment his curiosity overcame his weariness.

Already weavers were throwing their silk cables across the gap. He could see a huge web, brilliant in the green light. It was anchored against the boles of the nearer trees. Strands of carpet moss were starting to fill in the gaps. He could see the dull lumps that were the weavers continue their work. It was hard to believe that the mindless dog-size arachnids could build such a perfect structure. ‘What caused this?’ Borski asked.

Krask looked up and then moved ahead to the edge of the webbing. ‘Crash,’ he said.

Nipper saw that above them a huge swathe of topside had been cleared away. In the clear sky above he could see hive balloons floating, their long stinger lines dangling.

Nipper moved to the edge of the burned-out area and looked down. He peered into the gloom. Something was half-buried in the humus-swamp below. He upped the magnification of his goggles and saw that it was an armoured transport flyer. It looked like a gigantic beetle.

‘Side’s been torn out of it,’ Krask said. ‘Somebody must have hit it with a rocket-launcher. It’s no use to us.’

Nipper shook his head. He wondered who had been on the flyer, whether he had known any of the people for whom the vehicle was a coffin. It all seemed so futile.

What are we doing here, he asked himself; walking the surface of a world so far from home that the distance is incomprehensible. Fighting people I don’t even know, against whom I have no quarrel. In this jungle thousands of people are dying, and for what? The glory of the Emperor? The megalomaniac dreams of an insane governor?

He was shocked to find himself thinking such thoughts. They ran totally against his training, his indoctrination. What had happened to him? Once he had been proud to be an Imperial guardsman, to fight for the safety of the Empire. Now he just felt hollow. He was thinking like a heretic.

He was suddenly ashamed of himself. He was staining the honour of the regiment for which many of his comrades had died. He looked over at Borski and envied him his faith. Nipper had reached the limits of his. He felt an overwhelming urge to go to the commissar and confess his failure, to say that he was unworthy to be a soldier of the Emperor, to beg for the release from the endless fear that the commissar’s gun would bring him.

He was afflicted by a weariness not only of the body but of the spirit. It seemed pointless to go on. Even if, by some miracle, he escaped the bombardment he would just be sent back into the jungle to fight again. He did not want that. He had failed. The only thing left to do was atone.

He began to move towards the commissar. He felt Sal clutch at his hand with desperate strength.

‘No, Nipper, don’t,’ she said. ‘We can do it. If only you can make yourself go on.’

He tried to shake her off.

‘I can’t make it without your help,’ she said imploringly. He looked at her. She seemed desperate. He could not let her down. He did not feel capable of living up to the Imperial tradition of discipline and self-sacrifice but this was personal. The Marauders looked after their own.

They trudged on, a step at a time, away from the abyss. Behind them the weavers continued to work mindlessly, unaware of the passing of men or the imminence of their own doom.

Only three more hours, Nipper thought. And it will be over one way or another. I can put off death for that long.

‘I
THINK THEY
’
RE
getting ready to attack,’ Sal said. Nipper had thought he was too tired to be afraid but found he wasn’t.