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Jerrett sees Vos Drugath through a gap in the slow-moving blanket of fog. Twenty yards away his old friend leans out from behind the pitted rock of a lichen-covered headstone. His face is a pale, shivering contrast against the dark grey PDF helmet jammed tight on his head. Vos sees him looking and winks. Jerrett nods and wipes sweat away from his face.
They are not alone. Muffled grumbles and the shifting of chilly feet tells Jerrett that the rest of the company is still there, unseen but somewhere close. Some of them are making themselves comfortable, attested to by the rattling of equipment, though he thinks they’re wasting their time. Chances are orders from above will move them someplace else soon enough.
Their advance during the pre-dawn hours had been rapid and unopposed, a hasty plug fitted to fill a late realised gap in Imperial lines. Now deployed in amongst the towering gravestones and sepulchres of the cities great and good, their company is part of the secondary defensive line behind the lascannon and stubber teams at the cemetery wall. Fog rising from the river beyond the cemetery wall smothers conversation and chills the bones. By the time darkness becomes grey light, each of them is damp and miserable.
Yet their success is relative. Though there has been no sight of the enemy, there has also not been any sign of reinforcements moving up to support them. Jerrett knows enough to realise it is a fragile balance. The firing lines were now obscured, and nothing but the call of birds rises from the far side of the wall, thin, reedy, and hidden.
They wait, and they listen.
The fog steals meaning from time, stretching it out so that minutes feel like hours. Lamps flare, the muted glow looking like fairy lights from old stories. The officers extinguish them as soon as their usefulness is done. Sounds are flat and dislocated, pounced on at first as harbingers of imminent attack, over time the men dismiss them as meaningless noise.
Jerrett shifts position and brushes at the grass surrounding the headstone. Despite the cold, his tunic is soaked with sweat beneath his armour, and the dampness makes him acutely aware of the gaps between the flak plates.
There are cries in the mist now, occasional at first, mixed in with guttural shouts and, Throne help them, answering screams. They have all seen the grainy picts of green-skinned giants with red eyes and clawed hands, xenos set only upon the kill. For weeks, the planetwide information networks have plaintively asked why us? into the wide blue of the sky and received no answer. At least, no answer that men shivering in the shadow of other, long-dead men can fathom.
His knuckles grow white on the lasgun while around him expressions become taut as jaws clench and eyes widen. They know what is coming. Vos raises his hand, his fist clenched. Jerrett responds in kind, though he feels none of the bravado the action represents. When the mist moves sluggishly aside, he can see the sheen of sweat on his friend’s face.
There are whispers now among the sergeants as information is passed along from captain to lieutenant and down the ranks. Orders are relayed and confirmations are sought. Then, in their section as in others, the officers look up as if they can see the arced trajectory of lobbed munitions.
“Incoming!”
Whistles, then. Faint until screamingly loud. Men duck down, crouching behind anything bigger than they are, behind anything at all. Concussions rock the ground. Dirt and debris are kicked up and flung into the sky. The artillery is their own, but none of them trusts the gunnery sergeants at that moment. The impacts reverberate, jarring teeth, and shredding nerves. The noise is beyond anything they have ever heard; tinnitus comes in its wake. They pray to the God-Emperor that what lands on them is only dirt, but there are splashes of wetness too, and the men further back hear close screams as a shell lands short and a section of the wall disappears into dust, along with the squad stationed there.
Shouts for medics ring out and answering them come roars from beyond the wall. Men scramble forward and rush back. Screams pick at the nerves as the wounded receive attention.
The barrage stops.
They rise from the ground, brushing at the dirt, checking weapons, and each other. The shells might have delayed the Orks, but that is all they will do. The artillery does not speak again. Perhaps the Imperial commanders realised the xenos were too close to the PDF lines for an effective bombardment. Perhaps that brief roar of defiance was all they could muster.
“Eyes front, you lot. Eyes front. Pick your targets.” The call comes from a sergeant threading his way through their section. The mantra gets repeated along the line, echoing strangely among the gravestones and fog.
“Pick your targets?” says Vos. His grin is sickly. “He’s fuckin’ joking, isn’t he? Can’t see my hand in front of my face here.”
The sergeant doesn’t pause as he delivers his reprimand.
“Shut up. Watch the front.”
Jerrett forces a tight smile. A thought strikes him, now of all times; he has only called Vos by the abbreviated part of his surname for all the time they have known each other. Now he thinks of it, he can’t recall ever having used his friend's given name.
Sounds again, like a thousand drumbeats forming a singular whole. In amongst them, only heard when the marching feet miss a beat, comes what sounds like… laughter. The noise becomes oppressive without visual confirmation. Auspex readings return trailing ghost images like visible winds, adding to the disorientation they all feel. None of them knows if the enemy is behind them or in front of them. Someone says exactly that and gets silenced by a muffled thump. Better than having a commissar identify who said it.
Jerrett fits the stock of his weapon into his shoulder and holds his finger away from the trigger as he has been taught. He leans across the weapon and stares at his hand for long moments, willing it to stop trembling.
An enveloping quiet descends across the Imperial lines, interrupted by an occasional cough somewhere deep in the fog. Jerrett realises he has been holding his breath, but now doesn’t want to let go of it, fearful of being the first to break the silence, the first to draw attention to himself. For a moment, that is it; hushed anticipation, silent fear, and then, from beyond the wall a blaring cacophony of rage given voice as thousands of orks roar together. The sound rumbles over the Imperial lines like a physical blow, making them cower closer to the earth, as if seeking safety down amongst the already dead.
Jerrett and Vos look at each other, mute. Then the guns open up.
The first orks charge the perimeter, shouting wordless battle cries. Stubbers blaze and lasgun flashes illuminate the mist. Shootas rattle in answer. Chunks of stone explode from the perimeter wall and the slanted headstones behind. The men in the secondary line duck in response to the gunfire, then glance around their barricades.
Directly in front of Jerrett’s section, two men at the wall crumple backwards. An explosion tears a hole through the stone, and he sees the first of the Orks. It is huge, a looming nightmare partly hidden by fog and lit by the intermittent flash of lasbeams. Filthy, its skin an indistinct greenish grey in the muted light, it charges forward. The yellow of its tusks and the rust of its crude armour is forgotten as the reality of it fills his sight. The cleaver it hefts in its hand is unsophisticated, but when it crushes the chest of a trooper scrabbling out of its way, it is deathly effective. It bellows wordless hate and sprays bullets over the wall, straight into the second line of the Imperial defence. Another man goes down, felled by the last of the Ork’s ammunition.
“Move your arses!”
The sergeant stands over them and they scramble up, filling the air with shafts of searing light. Three ruby red beams transfix the ork, and as it staggers backwards, they fire again. Not every shot hits. The ork doesn’t fall. It rights itself and comes at them again, frothing blood between its teeth that looks black in the dim light. Only the sergeant isn’t panicking now.
There isn’t any blood from the alien’s wounds. Jerrett realises dimly that the lasbeams have cauterised the injuries they have inflicted. The thought seems to come from outside his head as if someone else is having it. He moves, he reacts, he fires his weapon, but at the same time, none of it is him.
The ork is through the hole in the wall, rearing up before him. It shoves Vos aside with the blistered stump of an arm. He falls and his helmet tumbles away into the fog. Jerrett slumps backwards against a headstone, panic firing upwards. The discharge sears away half of the ork’s face. Time lengthens as an alien eye boils in its socket, shedding steam.
The sergeant charges the creature, impaling it with a bayonet affixed to the end of his lasgun. The weapon sticks in the xenos flesh, and the sergeant squeezes the trigger. Before he can pull the weapon back, the ork brings its cleaver down on the man’s head. Though the blow is deflected by the curve of his helmet, his neck breaks, and the cleaver slices into his shoulder, separating it and his arm from his body. He falls without a sound, a marionette with its strings cut. But it is enough; even orks can only take so much punishment. The creature topples forward, pinning Jerrett to the ground.
He can’t breathe. The alien’s face is beside his own, a leering and gap-toothed thing from the darkest corners of his imagination. Its remaining eye is still open, and Jerrett imagines it isn’t dead but resting, just gathering itself for a few moments before lurching forward to tear his face off with those fetid tusks. He begins to scream.
The orks are at the perimeter no longer in ones and twos, but in squad strength. The Imperial firing line at the cemetery wall stands to meet them, holds for a minute, then buckles under the weight of the attackers and disintegrates. The secondary line comes under immediate pressure. Las beams crackle, stubbers clatter, and nothing can be heard beyond the din of combat; shouts, screams, battle cries, the thump of explosions. Smoke drifts in amongst the gravestones and mixes with the fog to create a thick atmosphere of discharge.
Jerrett’s voice has gone, and his cries have become tiny whimpers in the back of his throat. He struggles beneath the fallen alien, wriggling and pushing and twisting until he can get the weight of it off him.
For a second or two he simply lies in the dirt. The sensations are overwhelming. He can’t breathe. His hearing is dulled; every sound is felt as a low concussion in his bones. Flashes of light that leave shaded after images. The stench of blood and shit and smoke and foul things he can’t put a name to. He rises and stumbles, jarring his knee against something large and heavy on the ground. He can’t make out what the lump is, but he thinks it might be another dead alien. He feels only numbness.
Jerrett turns and staggers back into the broken PDF lines, flinching at sudden noises, wondering where his weapon is. The orks are in amongst them now, their momentum carving a bloody swathe, and all is a confusing mass of aural and visionary sensation, too quick for his mind to process. The fog is an apparition filled nightmare, a disorientating place of half seen tombstones and creatures intent on sending him to join the corpses interred there. He leans against a gravestone, his heart hammering faster than he’s ever known. Nowhere is safe.
Vos appears like a bloodied apparition out of the smoke and fog. His uniform is filthy, though he still has his mud-splattered lasgun. He looks at Jerrett without recognition before turning and shooting blindly in the direction of the enemy. His lips are drawn back and he snarls at nothing, firing at movement and shadows as if possessed.
Jerrett is knocked to the ground by something heavy, rising over his prone form like the encroaching shadow of death itself. His ribs have given way, but he still manages a scream from somewhere deep and feral inside him.
Vos is there then, still firing, hitting nothing. The ork swipes him nearly in two with something large and heavy and already covered in some other poor bastard’s innards. Vos flops to the ground, arterial blood pumping into the grass. Jerrett swears that for a moment, even mostly bisected, he can still see life in his friend’s eyes. He feels wetness in his groin and the creature roars. His last conscious act before his mind retreats is to scramble to his feet and run, through wisps of slowly evaporating fog and thicker tendrils of smoke, until his legs give out, and he collapses.
* * * * *
They find him in a shallow foxhole, behind a slab of masonry that has been blown from the side of a building by artillery fire. Rough hands drag him out of the shadows and haul him to his feet. He does not resist. The lieutenant leading them speaks to him but Jerrett can’t understand what he is saying, can’t think fast enough to form a response. He stares slack mouthed until the man shakes his head and walks away.
A yellowish glow of daylight fills a sky of sullen clouds. It is quiet now, the dull crump of munitions sparse and distant. Men move back and forth across a broken urban landscape, intent on individual tasks. Jerrett doesn’t know where they are in the city, but it is nowhere near the cemetery.
The soldiers march him past the shattered ruins of hab units and warehouses. He stumbles often, but they didn’t seem to mind. The road they walk is uneven, covered in debris from gutted buildings. Jerrett looks at them without emotion. He looks at the soldiers escorting him in the same way. Dressed the same as he is, they wear hollowed out expressions, their faces pale beneath the dirt. They are the same as billions of others, all along the length and breadth of the Imperium. Conscripts, wrenched from their everyday existence, handed a lasgun and shoved into the furnace of mankind’s eternal wars.
Their walk ends when the street widens into a small plaza surrounded by low buildings. Windows empty of glass stare down at them like accusers tracking the guilty as the small party reaches the centre of the space.
“Another traitor comes,” says a voice. Jerrett looks up from his feet and tries to rise above the fugue in his mind. The man speaking wears a high collared leather coat, shiny black as if it has passed under a shower. His hair, drawn back from his forehead and wetted down, looks like a ribbed oil slick sweeping across his scalp. His expression is as pale and grim as those of the men half dragging Jerrett between them.
Beyond the commissar, two men stand against wooden posts driven through flagstones, their hands tied behind them. Other posts beside the men are empty. A hand in his back shoves Jerrett past the officer towards them.
“Cowardice is treachery,” the commissar says, addressing a group of a dozen soldiers standing in front of the posts. “Running from the Emperor’s enemies is as good as joining them. Why? Because the traitor reveals his hand at the exact moment most likely to cause harm to the defenders of the Imperium. Can you tell me how that is different from cowardice?”
The soldiers are silent. They are as numbed as he is. The ones alongside Jerrett ignore the officer and concentrate on tying his hands to a post.
“Just so,” says the commissar. “It is not. And if we give death to traitors, should we not also give death to cowards? These men have damned themselves by their actions; malingering, turning tail before the enemies of mankind, they are not fit to serve the glorious name of the Emperor...”
The voice ceases to make sense to Jerrett. What did the commissar mean? Who was he talking about?
He wants to tell the officer that this is a mistake; that he shouldn’t be here; that he is only a driver of a mass transit vehicle in a minor city half a continent away, and this is nothing to do with him.
The man next to him cries out, shouting at the officer until an elbow across the face silences him and he slumps forward. That draws a response from the other man, who begins to shout obscenities, cursing the commissar, the Imperium, the greenskins, and everything else under the starved yellow sun of the world. A solider puts the butt of his stubgun into the man’s midriff, and he falls against his restraints, coughing and weeping.
A soldier approaches them. In his hands, he holds three slips of white vellum. He pins one to Jerrett’s chest but won’t meet his eyes. The action is repeated with the next prisoner, and the next. Jerrett stares around, uncomprehending. What was going on?
It isn’t until the rest of the soldiers step forward and raise their guns that it begins to dawn on him what is happening. Even then, the realisation is so slow in making its way through his stupefied mind that he never really comprehends what it is. That in itself is something of a mercy.
Jerrett thinks of a thousand things in those last moments, snippets of a life that whirl past at the speed of light; of his mother and father; kissing a girl for the first time; when he cheated on his entrance exams for the city transportation department; his bashful pride at putting on a PDF uniform; his oldest friend split like an autumn log by a roaring alien.
He looks to the sky, blinking in the light and hoping there might be a last sliver of blue to hold on to, but there is nothing but grey clouds and a pale-yellow sun somewhere above them that can’t break through.
There is a barked command from the commissar.
The soldiers take aim.
Another command.
Jerrett never hears the final crack as the stubguns fire.