‘Hetman Bronzi? Was there something you wanted?’ she called. The words came pinging out of her mouth like tiny chips of ice.
Bronzi smiled back amiably, and waggled the empty water bottles. ‘Going to the pump,’ he said.
Uxor Honen pushed through her waiting aides and came towards him. She was such a tiny thing, built like a girl-child, compact and slight. She wore a black bodyglove and a grey wrap, and walked on heeled slippers, which served only to emphasise her lack of stature. Her face was oval, her pursed mouth small, and her skin so very black. Her eyes seemed huge. At twenty-three, she was exceptionally young, given her level of responsibility, but that was often the way with uxors. Bronzi had a bit of a thing for her: so perfect, so delicate, so much power emanating from her tiny frame.
‘Going to the pump?’ she asked, switching from Low Gothic to Edessan. She often did that. She made a habit of speaking to the men, one on one, in their native tongues. Bronzi supposed these displays of linguistic skill were meant to seem cordial while emphasising her formidable intelligence. Where Bronzi came from – Edessa – funnily enough, that was called showing off.
He switched with her. ‘For water. I’m out.’
‘Water rationing was done earlier, hetman,’ she said. ‘I think that’s just an excuse to be nosey.’
Bronzi made what he hoped was a loveable shrug. ‘You know me,’ he said.
‘That’s why I think you’re being nosey,’ Honen said.
They stared at one another. Her enormous eyes slowly travelled down to his stockinged feet. He saw her fighting a smile. The trick with Flonen was to appeal to her sense of humour. That was why he’d left his boots off. Bronzi tried to hold his stomach in and still look natural.
‘Hard, isn’t it?’ she smirked.
What’s that now?’
‘Holding that gut of yours in?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, uxor,’ he replied.
Honen nodded. ‘And I don’t know why we keep you around, Hetman Bronzi,’ she remarked. ‘Isn’t there a mandatory fitness requirement any more?’
‘Or a weight threshold?’ suggested one of her aides: four blonde, teenage girls, who gathered around Honen with wry smiles on their faces.
‘Oh, you may mock me,’ Bronzi said.
‘We may,’ agreed one of the aides.
‘I’m still the best field officer you’ve got.’
Honen frowned. ‘There’s some truth in that. Don’t be nosey, Hurtado. You’ll be told what you need to know soon enough.’
‘A specialist?’
Honen shot a questioning glance sidelong at her aides. She reached out to them with her ’cept too. They all looked away, recoiling from the touch of the scolding ’cept, concentrating on other things. ‘Someone’s been talking,’ Honen announced.
‘A specialist, then?’ Bronzi pressed.
‘As I said,’ Honen answered, turning her attention back to him.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ said Bronzi, rattling his water bottles together as he gestured. ‘I’ll know when I know.’
‘Get your men settled,’ she told him, and turned to go.
‘Are the Dancers in?’ he asked.
‘The Dancers?’
‘They should be in by now. Peto owes me a payout on a wager. Are they here yet?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘No, Hurtado, not yet. We’re expecting them soon.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘then I request permission to take a foray team out, on a ramble, to find out what’s keeping them.’
‘Your loyalty to your friend does you credit, Hurtado, but permission is not granted.’
‘It’ll be dark soon.’
‘It will. That’s why I don’t want you rambling around out there.’
Bronzi nodded.
‘Are we clear on that? No clever or ingenious misinterpretations of that order forming in your mind this time?’
Bronzi shook his head. As if.
‘There’d better not be. Goodnight, hetman.’
‘Goodnight, uxor.’
Honen clicked away on her heels, sending out a command with her ’cept. Her aides paused for a moment, scowling at Bronzi, and then followed her.
‘Yeah, stare at me all you like, you blonde bitches,’ Bronzi murmured.
He padded back to the billet. ‘Tche?’
‘Yes, het?’
‘Get a foray team up and ready in ten minutes.’ Tche sighed at him. ‘Is this sanctioned, het?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely. The uxor told me personally that she doesn’t want some fug-fingered ramble blundering around out there, so tell the boys it’s going to have to be sharp and professional, which will make a change for them.’
‘Not a ramble?’
‘I never ramble. Sharp, Tche, and professional. Got it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Bronzi pulled on his boots and redressed his weapon belt. He realised he needed to take a leak. ‘Five minutes,’ he told the bashaw.
He found the latrine, a stinking cement pit down the hall, unbuckled his armour and sighed as his bladder emptied. Nearby, men were showering in the communal air baths, and he could hear singing from one of the other troop billets.
‘You’ll stay put tonight,’ said a voice from behind him.
Bronzi tensed. The voice was quiet and hard, small yet powerful, like the super-gravity coal of a dead sun.
‘I think I’ll finish what I’m doing, actually,’ he replied, deliberately not looking around, and deliberately keeping a tone of levity in his voice.
‘You will stay put tonight. No fun and games. No bending the rules. Are we clear?’
Bronzi buckled up, and turned.
The specialist stood behind him. Bronzi slowly adjusted his stance until he was looking up at the man’s face. Terra, he was huge, a monster of a man. The specialist’s features were hidden in the shadows of his dust shawl.
‘Is that a threat?’ Bronzi asked.
‘Does someone like me need to threaten someone like you?’ the specialist replied.
Bronzi narrowed his eyes. He was a lot of things, but timid wasn’t one of them. ‘Come on then, if you want some.’
The specialist chuckled. ‘I really admire your balls, hetman.’
‘They were only out because I was taking a leak,’ said Bronzi.
‘Bronzi, right? I’ve heard about you. More barefaced cheek in you than all the arses in the Imperial Army.’
Bronzi couldn’t help but grin, though his pulse was racing. ‘I could mess you up, son, I really could.’
‘You could try,’ said the specialist.
‘I would, you know?’
‘Yes, I have a feeling you might. Don’t. I’d hate to damage a friend. Let me be clear. There are things going on tonight that you must not mess with. Don’t let me down by pissing around. Don’t get involved. You’ll understand soon enough. For now, right now, hetman, take my word on this.’
Bronzi kept his stare going. ‘I might. I might trust you, if I could see your face or know your name.’
The specialist paused. For a moment, Bronzi thought he was actually going to pull down his shawl and show his face.
‘I’ll tell you my name,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘My name is Alpharius.’
Bronzi blinked. His mouth went dry. He felt his heart pounding so fast it trembled his torso.
‘Liar. You liar! That’s a pile of crap!’
A sudden, brilliant flash made the chamber blink white for a second. A deep, reverberative boom reached them.
Bronzi ran to one of the slit windows. Outside, in the dark, he could see the flashes and light blooms of a major battle flaring behind the ridge. The percussive crump and slap of explosions rolled in. One hell of a firefight had just kicked off along the wadi rim less than ten kilometres away from the post. It was concussive, bending the air, bending sound.
Behind Bronzi, men were rushing up, scrabbling around the windows to see out. There was chatter and agitation. Everyo
ne wanted a look.
‘Peto…’ Hurtado Bronzi murmured. He turned away from the window slit and the rippling light show, pushing his way back through the mob of men to find the specialist.
But the specialist had already vanished.
THE WORLD HAD come off its hinges. For the first few seconds, Peto Soneka thought his company had been caught up in some sort of freak hail-storm. Thousands of luminous projectiles were raining down out of the twilight into the basin, like spits of fire or a cloudburst of little shooting stars. Every one exploded in a searing fireball as it impacted. The overpressure was knocking men to the ground. Soneka reeled as fiery detonations went off all around him like grenades. The bang of the first few impacts had deafened him.
He saw men thrown, burning, into the air by blooming flashes. He saw three of his company’s tanks quiver and then explode in whickering storms of shrapnel fragments as the sizzling pyrophoric deluge struck them.
It wasn’t a freak hail-storm. Despite the Dancer’s scouts and recon, despite their auspex and modar, despite their careful deployment and marching cover, despite the omniscient monitoring of the expedition fleet in high orbit, the Nurthene had surprised them.
The Nurthene were of a tech level several points down the scale from the Imperium. They possessed guns and tanks, but still favoured blades. They should have been easy to overrun.
But from the opening actions of the expedition war, it had become clear that the Nurthene had something else, something the Imperium entirely lacked.
Lord Commander Teng Namatjira had described it, in a moment of infuriation, as air magick. The name had, perhaps unfortunately, stuck. Air magick was why Nurth had held off the might of an Imperial Army expedition for eight months. Air magick was why a Titan cohort had been decimated at Tel Khortek. Air magick was why a Sixth Torrent division had disappeared into the desert sink at Gomanzi and never returned. Air magick was why nothing flew above Tel Utan, why every attempt to destroy the place with air strikes, missiles, orbital bombardments and troop drops had failed, and why they were being forced to assault the place on foot.
It was Peto Soneka’s first direct taste of air magick. All the horror stories that had leaked back from regiment to regiment and company to company were true. The Nurthene had lore beyond the Terran range. The elements obeyed them. They were casters-in of devils.
A shockwave threw Soneka over on his face. He had blood in his mouth and sand up his nose. He rose on his hands and saw a geno trooper curled up beside him, blackened by heat, smouldering. In the rapid strobe light of multiple explosions, he saw other corpses scattered around him. The sand was burning.
Bashaw Lon came running out of the flashing air. He was yelling at Soneka. Soneka could see Lon’s mouth working, but heard nothing.
Lon hauled Soneka to his feet. Sound was coming back, but only in short bursts.
‘Get… to… the… we… impossible!’ Lon yelled.
‘What? What?’
‘…much… of… to… the… fugging idiots!’
The hail suddenly ceased. Blinking around at the devastation, Soneka heard snippets of the abrupt quiet too: blurts of crackling fire and the screams of men, cut up and mixed with baffling, numb seconds of profound deafness.
‘Oh fug!’ Lon cried, suddenly, awfully audible.
The Nurthene were on them.
Nurthene infantry – called ‘echvehnurth’ – swarmed out of the shadows and pits of the enclosing night, and poured into the firelight. Their swirling pink robes and silver armour shone in the flames. Their falxes whirled. Several of them carried aloft kite-tailed banners showing the water-reed and river reptile badge of the Nurthene royalty.
The falx was an astonishingly proficient and barbarous weapon. Two and a half metres long, it was essentially a hybrid spear, a scythe straightened out. Half its length was a straight handgrip, the other half a long blade with a slight bias hook, the inside curve of which was razor sharp. Spinning and sweeping a falx like a flail, an expert echvehnurth could lop off limbs and heads, and even bisect torsos. The blades went through almost any metal. Only liqnite could break the blades, but it was impossible to use it in combat. Liqnite canisters came out when the fight was done, to neuter the fallen weapons of the enemy. A spray of liquid nitrogen froze the metal brittle so that it could be shattered under foot.
Echvehnurth rushed at them from the ditches of the sink. The first Dancers they met were scythed down by the long, whirling blades like tall corn. Arms and heads flipped into the air. Arterial blood squirted. Truncated bodies fell like sacks. A few carbines fired, but it was hardly a proper reply.
Soneka started running forwards. ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ he howled. ‘Gun them down. Use your guns. Don’t let them in!’
They were in already. The night sand was littered with geno corpses and body parts. There was a fine haze of blood in the warm air. Soneka could taste it. His hearing was back, and his ears were filled with the hiss and chop of butchery, and the screams of his men.
He kept running. He fired his carbine one-handed, drawing his sword bayonet in the other. An echvehnurth ran at him and Soneka blew his face off. The man cartwheeled backwards. A falx swung and Soneka sidestepped, kicking its owner’s feet out from under him so that he fell on his back. Soneka ran the Nurthene through with his bayonet.
He dropped on one knee, raised the carbine to his shoulder, its barrel resting on the fork of his blade grip, and picked off two more of the charging enemy with aimed shots. Their pink robes trailed out as they crashed backwards. Lon was beside Soneka, along with three other men, firing in sustained bursts. Their shots made bright darts in the air. Echvehnurth toppled and fell, one on fire, another with his ribcage blown wide.
‘Dancers, Dancers! This is the Dancers!’ Soneka yelled as he fired. ‘CR19! We need help here. Immediate. Major incursion!’
‘Stand by, Dancers,’ he heard an uxor’s voice reply. ‘We are aware. Retasking units to your position.’
‘Now!’ Soneka yelled. ‘Now. We’re being slaughtered!’
One of the men beside him suddenly fell sideways, split in two from shoulder to groin. Pressurised blood escaped in all directions at once. Soneka wheeled and saw an echvehnurth spinning his falx back from the blow to strike again. Soneka slashed with his sword bayonet in an attempt to block.
The long blade of the falx, just a blur of blue metal in the violet twilight, went through Soneka’s hand in a line across the base of the thumb, severing his fingers, his thumb and the upper half of his palm, and snapping the grip of his sword bayonet. The blow was so clean that there was no pain at first. Soneka staggered backwards, watching the thin sprays of blood jetting out of his ruined hand.
The falx circled again, tracing a glitter in the air.
It did not land.
Another falx blocked it. Blade struck blade, and the attacking falx shivered away. A dark figure slid into view and killed the echvehnurth with a single, explosive shot.
The newcomer was a huge brute done up in a dark mail sleeve, his head and shoulders swathed in a shawl. He carried a falx in one hand and a boltgun in the other.
He looked down at Soneka. ‘Courage,’ he said.
‘Who are you?’ Soneka whispered.
Lon had run to Soneka’s side. ‘Get this man’s hand bound,’ the big man told the bashaw. He turned back to the fight, rotating the falx expertly in his left hand like a baton.
He wasn’t alone. As Lon wrapped his hand, Soneka saw that a dozen anonymous men had entered the fight, coming out of the darkness like phantoms. Each one of them was inhumanly large, his face hooded in a desert shawl. Each one carried a bolter and a falx.
They moved with a speed that was not human, and struck each blow with a force that was not human. In a matter of minutes, they had carved the heart out of the echvehnurth attack. Their boltguns roared and pumped like thunder, blowing pink silk and silver into blood-caked pieces.
‘Astartes,’ Soneka gasped.
‘Stay with me, het, s
tay with me,’ Lon whispered.
‘They’re Astartes,’ Soneka said.
‘You’ve lost a lot of blood. Don’t go to sleep on me!’
‘I won’t,’ Soneka promised. ‘Those men… those things… they’re Astartes.’
Lon didn’t answer. He was staring at the horizon. ‘Holy Terra,’ he whispered. Tel Utan had caught fire.
HONEN MU WATCHED the city burn from an upper window of the CR23 post. Every once in a while, a building cooked off and blew out in a streamer of fire. Rising smoke hazed the clear night sky. Her aides winced and oohed at every snap of flame. She could feel their responses through her ’cept.
She nodded, finally. ‘May I inform the Lord Commander?’
‘You may,’ said the specialist, waiting behind her. ‘I will make a report to him personally, of course, but you should have the pleasure of transmitting this news to him first.’
Honen turned from the window. ‘Thank you. And thank you for your work.’
‘Nurth isn’t done yet. There is much to do,’ the specialist told her.
‘I understand.’
The specialist hesitated, as if he slightly doubted this.
‘Our paths may not cross again, Uxor Honen Mu,’ the specialist said. ‘There are two things I want to say. The Emperor protects is one of them. The other is a word of admiration for the Geno Five-Two. You have bred good soldiers, in the finest genetic tradition. You ought to know that the old gene legacy of the Chiliads was an inspiration the Emperor acknowledged in creating us.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Honen, surprised.
‘Ancient history, pre-Unification,’ said the specialist. ‘There’s no reason you should. I must go now. It has been a pleasure making war with you, Uxor Honen Mu.’
‘And with you… though I still don’t know your name.’
‘I am Alpha Legion, lady. Given your ’ceptive powers, I think you can guess it.’
THE SPECIALIST LEFT the post through the back halls, walking through shadow. He moved silently and quickly. Near the north gate, he stopped in his tracks, and turned slowly.
‘Hello again,’ said Hurtado Bronzi, stepping out of the darkness with his carbine aimed at the specialist’s chest.
‘Het. My compliments. That was a genuine feat of stealth.’