When the transport’s enormous pressure hatch opened, what greeted us was not the fresh air of some alien world. It was a heavy atmosphere: the toxic gas and smog I had breathed my whole life in the hive city’s underhive, strangely mixed with the stench of wet earth and rotting corpses.
"Get down! Move, you hive-rat bastards! Get your feet moving!"
With the officer’s ear-splitting shout, a harsh whip came down across our flak armour. Hundreds of recruits dragged their frozen bodies down the transport ramp.
The ‘real sky’ I was seeing for the first time in my life was no better than the artificial ceiling of the hive city, turned blue by ruptured gas pipes. An empty sky blanketed in ash-grey clouds and the smoke of bombardment. Not a single scrap of sunlight reached the ground.
"88th Castigar Hive Guard Regiment, 3rd Battalion, B Company, 4th Platoon! Form up!"
Jostled at random amid the surging crowd, I passed through a dim connecting corridor. By scanning the barcode branded onto my left forearm when I was conscripted, I became an official component of this immense Imperial war machine. One standard-issue lasgun, battered flak armour, and a gas mask—that was everything I was given.
When I arrived at [Sector Gamma-9], 4th Platoon’s defensive sector, the first reality that greeted me was cold, wet mud that swallowed me to the ankles.
Squish, squish.
With every step, heavy, sticky mud clung to my boots. Having grown up walking only on the hard metal floors of a hive world, the mud on the trench floor that swallowed my feet filled me with an extreme disgust. The wooden duckboards laid along the bottom had already been blasted and soaked half to death, vomiting rotten water.
"Hey, rookie. Don’t just stand there staring. Unless you want your toes to swell, burst, and rot off."
Lazar, a veteran chewing black leaf tobacco through a mouth missing several teeth, looked me over from beneath a dented tin roof and spat out the words.
The trench was cramped. Its dug-out earthen walls, sodden with moisture, constantly crumbled inward, while coughs and groans spread from every direction. I set my bag down in a corner of the trench where I could at least avoid the rain. Several soldiers were already huddled there.
Dorn, a rookie from an agricultural world, kept ramming his head against the trench wall and dry-heaving without even taking off his gas mask. Apparently, the stink of rotting corpses and damp soil was less familiar to him than factory smog.
Beside him, Brix, the large soldier I had seen aboard the transport, silently tended to his lasgun’s power pack. A little farther away, Talia, a female soldier with sharp eyes, rubbed her bayonet blade against a whetstone, radiating a fierce air.
Scrrrape...
Only the sharp metallic rasp of the bayonet grinding against stone cut through the heavy silence in the trench. No one asked anyone else’s name. Hundreds of us had disembarked together, yet here in this mud, we were perfectly isolated islands.
"Hey, hive rookie."
Lazar exhaled tobacco smoke through the filter of his gas mask and nudged my leg with the toe of his boot.
"Your tags will be buried beneath that No Man’s Land mud in a week anyway, so don’t go getting attached to me. Got it?"
I nodded without a word. It was the instinct for reading the room I had learned back among the hive gangs. The air in the trench was cold, and the mud was slowly seeping through my boots, stealing the warmth from my toes.
After Lazar’s cold warning, a heavy silence settled over the trench.
Some sludge—rainwater or wastewater, impossible to tell—dripped through gaps in the tin roof. To keep my feet from sinking into the mud, I barely managed to place both of them atop a nearly collapsed wooden duckboard I had scavenged from a pile of rubbish.
"Chow time!"
A supply trooper carrying a dented mess tray passed along the far side of the trench, shouting without enthusiasm.
What was tossed to me was a palm-sized rectangular grey block. The Imperium’s standard combat ration, called corpse cake or starch ration. When I put the tasteless lump, which did not even have a smell, into my mouth and chewed, a dry texture of sawdust mixed with unidentified protein powder scraped across my tongue. It tasted even worse than the synthetic dairy products I had eaten in the hive city’s underhive, but if I wanted to keep my body temperature up in this mud, I had to force it down my throat.
"Urgh... Bleurgh!"
Dorn, seated beside me, finally vomited stomach fluid onto the trench floor. It seemed he could not properly swallow even a mouthful of water, much less a ration.
"Keep throwing up like that, and you’ll be the first one to freeze to death tonight, farmer Dorn."
Brix muttered indifferently as he snapped the lasgun power pack he had been servicing back into place. Just as he said, the temperature beneath the grey sky—where there was not even a sign of sunset—was dropping fast.
Before long, a metal canister filled with lukewarm recaff arrived from the battalion supply depot. It was a black liquid that tasted of rust and bitter ash, but when I clasped the steaming cup in both hands, feeling finally returned to my frozen fingers.
"Attention, all of you."
Sergeant Yakov, squad leader of Second Squad, appeared around the corner of the trench. His entire face was covered in red burn scars, and he swept his one gleaming eye over the recruits.
"At 0300 tonight, B Company is conducting a full perimeter patrol. Don’t let your guard down just because the daytime barrage has died off. Those rebel bastards across the way are just as mad from the mud as we are."
Sergeant Yakov tapped his loaded lasgun and looked back and forth between Talia and me.
"Especially you hive-born rookies. Don’t think you can show off just because you’re used to the dark, get your heads blown off by an enemy marksman’s lamp, and don’t put your hands on the trigger until the commander gives the signal. Understood?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
The reply spread weakly through the trench. Once Sergeant Yakov was gone, Lazar lit the cigarette butt between his lips again.
Thoom...
From beyond No Man’s Land came a low, heavy vibration that shook the ground. It was not mere thunder. It was the opening prelude to the enemy artillery opening its barrels and preparing a heavy bombardment.
As if by prior agreement, every soldier in the trench stopped eating and looked up at the sky. Dorn’s ragged breathing came from inside his dented gas mask, while Talia sheathed her bayonet and disengaged the safety on her lasgun.
The mud was gradually growing colder, and the night had not even begun.
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register