Nipper turned to see movement among the distant branches of the nation-trees.
‘Tea’s out,’ said Truk.
A
LL AROUND HIM
the jungle seemed to burn. From overhead came blinding laser flashes as rebel jetbikes swooped insanely under topside. Nipper raised his laser and snapped off a quick shot. He hit a bike-pilot in the face. The wounded man leaned forward on the controls. The bike nose-dived. Nipper could see his gunner trying to jump clear.
Nipper tracked its fall, ready to shoot any survivors. The jet-cycle hit a weak patch in the carpet moss and vanished from view. Nipper heard a long scream followed by a splash. Involuntarily he shuddered. The things that lived below, in the eternal wet darkness beneath the nation-tree’s roots, were things he had nightmares about.
‘Nipper, down!’ he heard Borski shout.
Without thinking he threw himself flat on the greenside floor. A stream of bolt pistol fire passed through where he had just been standing. Nipper looked at the point of impact and saw a tall, thin warrior in the camouflage uniform of the rebels fall. He turned to thank the commissar but he had already moved on, rushing towards the cover of a muck-fungus tree. Laser fire withered the carpet moss behind his feet.
Nipper rolled over and searched for the firer. He saw a huge dark figure moving among the shadows of nearby tree boles. He brought his lasrifle up to the fire position and sent a full-intensity burst towards his target. Brilliant white fire played over it. Burn, heretic, thought Nipper.
He felt a thrill of fear as the figure refused to fall. His finger slackened on the trigger. He could make out details as the rebel advanced towards him. His heart sank. It was a killer robot, obviously modified to find its way through the greenside. One hand was a chainsword, the other had a heavy bolter which it was laboriously bringing to bear on Nipper.
He could hear the whine of servo-motors as the arm moved. The heavy plasteel of its carapace had melted and ran where Nipper’s laser had struck. It was painted with several strange and disturbing runes. Nipper leapt back as it opened fire.
Explosive bullets churned the carpet moss where he had been. He cast a glance towards the nearest cover. Too far, he thought, I’ll never make it. He grinned, as adrenaline raced through his body. His circle of awareness seemed to expand as he waited for bullets to rip through him. He turned and he could make out the tiny webwork of engraving on the robot’s carapace, hear the crack of small arms fire and the screams of the dying. Everything seemed discrete and distinct. He could hear his breath rumble within his chest and feel the individual movement of every muscle. He stared down the barrel of that huge gun.
Facing death, he felt totally alive.
He rolled to one side and the robot’s arm seemed to track as if in slow motion. He raised his own weapon and reached for the action of the grenade launcher. Only one chance, he thought. Better get it right.
He came to rest and fired the grenade. It arced towards the robot’s feet and detonated. Nipper felt the force of the explosion ripple the carpet moss.
He looked back at the robot. It still stood. I’m dead, thought Nipper.
Then the robot seemed to slowly disappear. It vanished from view and fell. As Nipper had intended, the grenade had weakened the moss beneath it. He let out a long breath. It felt good to be alive. He noticed more rebels advancing among the trees. Their full-face spore-masks and bulging goggles made them look like horrible insects. He saw that they too had strange runes on their chests where badges of battle honour should have been.
‘Fall back,’ he heard Borski shout. There was a note of bitterness in the commissar’s voice. He did not relish sounding the retreat.
Nipper ran back towards his own lines. Each step took forever. He felt light, as if he were walking on the moon. Laser beams blurred past his head, almost blinding him. Miraculously none hit him. Under the shadow of swooping jet-bikes he reached the cover of a snapwort bush. A familiar figure huddled behind it, laspistol in hand.
‘L
EAVE ME
,’ S
AL
said. ‘Save yourself.’
Her wounds looked worse than they were. The long sticky leaves of the vampire plant fondled them obscenely, looking for blood. Nipper looked out from cover.
Flitting from bole to bole were hundreds of rebel troopers. From above, a dozen heavily modified jetbikes gave covering fire. The enemy had broken through.
Nipper checked Sal’s filter mask. It was still completely in place. Good. He unclipped some med-plas from his belt and sprayed the wounded area.
‘That should kill any spores,’ he muttered, watching the plasti-flesh congeal. He hoped the disinfectant and fungicide worked better than the last lot or Sal was in for a painful death.
‘I mean it, Nipper. Go! If you’re still here when the rebels come, they’ll—’
‘No can do, Sal,’ he said. ‘You know the code.’
She looked up at him and smiled in spite of her pain. ‘The Marauders look after their own. Nipper, we’re not back on Thranx and this isn’t a streetfight.’
He shrugged. ‘Hey… If we don’t look after each other no one else will.’
Suddenly Sal’s face went slack. He knew she was in listening trance. A moment later intelligence flooded back into her face.
‘Borski and Krask have the rest of them about two hundred metres back. They’re heading for the old comms hutch. Go the way I tell you. I think we’ll have a clear path.’
Nipper nodded. ‘Can you run, Sal?’
‘I’ll have to.’
Just before they made the break she turned and looked back towards the oncoming enemy. An expression of fear passed across her face.
‘By the Emperor, they hate us so,’ she said. She and Nipper ran. From behind came the sounds of sporadic firing as the rebels mopped up the last of the opposition.
‘W
E
’
RE ON OUR
own,’ Borski said, with a certain grim satisfaction. He looked like a man who had just found a big enough challenge to measure his faith against. He cut the comm-link with HQ. Lieutenant Mikals cried out in agony.
Wonderful, Nipper thought, looking around the old Harvesters’ cabin that some dead tech-adept had converted into a communications nexus. It had a familiar homey look. He had grown up surrounded by machinery, not giant plants. For a moment he felt home-sick for a place far beyond his ability to measure distance.
He slumped wearily down on the hard bench. He was tired, as much from the brief firefight as the night of marching that had followed.
He didn’t want to think about that nightmarish journey through the green. He had had to partially carry Sal while keeping alert for any threats from the surrounding forest. Once he had almost been ensnared by a dreamspider’s web. Several times he had nearly fallen through the carpet moss to swamp-side thirty metres below. Twice he had to hide, frozen with fear, while rebel scouts filtered by. It had taken them what felt like forever to reach the comms hutch.
He looked around at the few survivors of A Company. He saw Borski, the sarge, Lieutenant Mikals, Truk. There were few familiar faces from the old days when the Devil’s Marauders had been a streetgang in the worldcity of Thranx. That had been before the Raising when they had been fierce and desperate enough to be inducted into the Imperial Guard.
By the Emperor, there had been nearly a hundred of them then. Now there was only himself and Sal, Hunt, Glyn, Маk and Colquan. His friends had changed. They still wore their gang colours but they had been incorporated into the uniform of the guard. The only real sign of their former allegiance was the huge devil head on the backs of their combat jackets. They still had the old face tattoos but the faces themselves were thinner, gaunt and haunted, patched with scars. Hunt had a bionic eye visible under his face mask. Маk had an arm of plasteel and servomotors.
A palpable air of demoralization had fallen over the room. All the others are dead or in the hands of rebels, Nipper thought. He didn’t know which was worse. Mikals whimpered in agony.
‘No chance of any support?’ Krask asked. The sarge looked more tired than any man had a right to be and still be alive, Nipper thought. He had carried the terribly wounded Mikals all night on his own.
‘None,’ Borski said sternly. ‘The heretics have begun a massive offensive right across Blue Zone. Still, the righteous will prevail. Within one standard day
Divine Retribution
will cleanse this whole zone with an orbital bombardment. We have been ordered to fall back.’
‘What?’ Krask was both frightened and bewildered. Nipper broke from his reverie. Anything that scared Krask terrified Nipper. He had never seen the sergeant display anything but laconic cool.
‘That’s madness,’ Krask muttered. ‘The whole reason for sending us into the jungle in the first place was to drive Governor Damian’s rebels out without damaging the witch-spore crop.’
‘That was before the full scale of the insurrection was realized,’ Borski said, almost gently. ‘We did not realize the cancer of heresy had spread so deep. We are not facing simply a rebel garrison but many of the native tribes of the interior. They’re armed and they’re allied with something dark and terrible. They bear its mark.’
For the first time Nipper thought that he detected a trace of what might have been fear in the commissar’s voice. He thought back to the strange runes he had seen on the robot. He had heard stories, muttered tales, of daemons who existed in the dark between worlds and sought to undermine the works of the righteous. He had always dismissed them as stories to frighten children.
Beside him Sal muttered. ‘It makes sense. Where better for them to strike than on the world where witch-spore comes from? Many latents would have their powers brought to the fore.’
Nipper wondered what she was talking about. He knew that psykers were dangerous. The priests of the Imperial cult told everyone so. Only ones who had been bonded to the Emperor or who had undergone the terrible training to become sanctioned could be allowed to live. Could those who had not been bonded provide some sort of gateway for enemies of the Emperor?
Nipper felt Sal nudge him in the ribs. She gave him a warning look. ‘You are on dangerous ground,’ she whispered. ‘Best to not even think of such mysteries.’
Another more pressing problem struck Nipper. He addressed Borski. ‘Sir, if they are going to cleanse this place in twenty-four hours what will happen to us?’
‘We are ordered to fall back to Zone Amber.’
Mikals reached out imploringly, eyes filled with pain. ‘Commissar, I am wounded. I will only slow you on the march. I have failed the Emperor. I seek atonement.’
Borski looked down at him, cold eyes hooded. He nodded. ‘Very well. Soldiers outside, prepare to depart.’
The guards left the hut. From within came the sound of a single shot. Borski emerged alone. ‘Now we must go,’ he said.
‘Zone Amber is fifty kilometres away. We’ll never get there before the bombardment starts,’ Nipper said.
Borski showed his chilling smile. ‘Then we will die joyous in the knowledge that we have served our Emperor well,’ he said.
W
EARILY THE SURVIVORS
pushed on through the nation-forest. Dawn had come, bringing a wash of green light down through topside. Nipper watched the endless tide of airborne spores rise on convection currents. Dazzling dragon-moths, long as a man’s arm, pursued shoals of glitterflies. Sometimes puff-balls would roll out onto the main branches they followed and Truk would kick them, laughing moronically as they exploded.
Only Truk did not seem oppressed by their surroundings and the fact that they were twenty hours from being reduced to plasma by the orbital bombardment. Nipper wondered how he could ever have liked this place.
It had all seemed so fresh and amazing to him six months ago: a riot of green life erupting across a continent. From the two hundred metre high banyan-like nation-trees to the triple-tiered ecology they supported, it had all been wonderful to a boy from the steel corridors of the hive-world of Thranx.
He had marvelled at the differences between the layers. It had delighted him that topside, with its swinging monkeys and bright sunlight, was as different from greenside as that was from the devil-python-infested swamps below.
He could well remember his first sight of topside: an endless garden of flowers visible from the armoured aircar’s glassteel windows. He could remember the terror of his first patrol, hunting raiders in the eternal darkness of the humus swamps at the nation-trees’ roots. Even that had held a strange kind of wonder, as they had walked across the rippling surface on pontoon shoes while pale beasts scuttled from the light of their torches.
But it had been greenside he had loved best. He had marvelled at the way branches of the great trees had intermeshed so tightly that carpet moss could grow between them to form a near solid surface which could, mostly, support a man’s weight. It had seemed miraculous that it was all supported underneath by the steel-hard cablewebs of the weavers.
It was so perfect that it could almost have been designed by a god. Even now that the initial glamour had faded it still seemed slightly blasphemous to him that it was about to be wiped from orbit.
He looked up at the cathedral-like arches of the trunks rising above him and shook his head, as if he could shake off his feelings of reverence as easily as a dog shaking off water. He couldn’t. The place dwarfed him, as it dwarfed the straggling line of his companions, even mighty Truk.
‘You’re right,’ Sal said from beside him. She was looking up at him with a strange expression on her face, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘We don’t belong here.’
‘We don’t fit, do we?’ he said. ‘Everything else here has symmetry, contributes something to the pattern about us. Even the rebels have learned to blend in, in a weird sort of way. That’s why they are beating us.’
Sal smiled. ‘Symmetry – it’s because this world was designed by bio-adepts during the Dark Age of Technology. That’s what records say. I was in the mind of the clerk who was transcribing the report back at Dropsite.’