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The Blooded – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Blooded

David McDougall

The ground seemed to heave and motes of dust danced in the static-filled air as the artillery barrage whistled overhead.

‘Take cover!’ Sergeant Varis Ulker bellowed.

It wasn’t enemy fire. The artillery company of his own 51st Keavan Armoured Infantry Regiment were pounding the advancing enemy with no less than sixty tons of high-explosive ordnance every minute. And like most of the regiments deployed on the planet supporting the defence of Hive Braacus, the 51st was primarily filled with recently drafted and poorly trained conscripts who weren’t known for their accuracy. That, and the prospect of what was to come, made Varis nervous. No matter the number of campaigns or your experience, the thought of conflict was always unnerving.

At this stage, the enemy were nothing more than shapes and shadows to him – fleeting glimpses of impossibly grotesque shapes. But even at this distance the wet slap of limbs was unmistakable.

He focused.

‘Stand by!’ Varis roared, attempting to match the rising pitch of the artillery. He pointed to the heavy weapons trooper, Blarin Prakk. ‘Once the barrage is down, I want that heavy bolter up on the parapet, looking for targets!’

Prakk was a bald brute of a man with thickset arms covered in black underhive ganger tattoos. Varis was fairly sure that Prakk could refit the power plant of a Chimera without the aid of a Mechanicus servitor hoist. Even the heavy bolter looked small when he wielded it.

Prakk nodded in response, and readied himself by checking the ammunition feed and tripod mount with an enthusiastic grin on his face. Like most of the squad, he was a man of few words.

At least they can do the job.

Varis couldn’t say the same for the rest of the line, however. A little over three hundred yards to the left, the defensive centre was a cacophony of needless chatter and movement. Commissars barked supposedly inspirational instructions to pale-faced conscripts. High-ranking officers lorded over their subordinates, issuing orders from separate trenches that were marked out by several Imperial standards. It seemed laughable to Varis, especially with the soldiers they commanded positioned only a few yards away.

Priests of the Ecclesiarchy dotted about the trenches chanted holy litanies with a religious fervour that few could match. Some wailed incoherently into the air, while others proclaimed the incoming artillery as the Emperor’s personal deliverance. One had even stripped himself to the waist in an act of self-flagellation, inviting the Master of Mankind’s wrath. Even from the flanking position where Varis was deployed, he could see that the man’s back was a bloody ruin.

Varis looked through the magnoculars at the designated impact area six hundred yards to the front as the landscape was being reduced to fire and ash. Artillery was nothing if not destructive. With or without the Emperor’s protection, Varis knew this day would surely be won with firepower, precision, and the ability to hold the contents of your bowels firmly in place.

I’ll pray for the Emperor when my lasrifle has run out of power and everyone else around me is dead.

Ahead, the air was thick with dust that held itself up in the stark sunlight like a soiled curtain. Despite the typically dry Glabian weather and the constant heat of battle, it seemed eerily dank and still.

Amid the already churned earth to the front, hundreds, possibly thousands, of emaciated and malformed figures stalked towards the defensive line. They held a variety of weapons that to Varis seemed ill-suited to any form of combat: a mix of spears, stakes and blades. Some carried nothing at all. And they all walked with an unnatural, seemingly enthusiastic shamble. Like a starving, pox-ridden canid that could still smell its prey.

The initial heretic assault had been sudden and unexpected. They were far from the incursions of the 13th Black Crusade. Far from the Eye of Terror. It was only pure luck – or the watchful gaze of the Emperor, Varis had jested to himself – that had repelled the enemy vanguard.

Which idiot decided to attack during the largest planetwide military live-fire exercise in the sector, on one of the most heavily populated planets in the Imperium?

Though Varis suspected the reason for the assault was exactly that. The exorbitant Imperial tithes fed into more than forty Astra Militarum regiments throughout the segmentum.

The first detonation made Varis flinch, and he ducked into the dirt, expecting death to follow close behind. But it didn’t. The compression wave thundered through his ribcage a moment later.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Varis dusted himself off and peered over the lip of the trench.

Some of the less-experienced troopers in the centre of the line cried out. But Varis looked on with morbid curiosity as the artillery barrage proved to be surprisingly accurate. Each fiery explosion sent huge mounds of earth, fire and dust high into the air, scattering debris and body parts in all directions. Scores of the enemy soldiers were instantly obliterated as the high-explosive shells detonated in their midst. Explosion followed explosion, causing more dust to billow skywards.

An unnatural twilight descended on the battlefield, accompanied by a dank stillness, seemingly unaffected by the ferocity of the barrage.

‘Have you seen this?’ said a coarse, female voice to his right. ‘They’re relentless.’

Varis turned to see his designated sharpshooter, Corporal Alicia Ostarch, at the end of the sandbag-topped parapet of the trench. She was looking in the direction of the barrage through the magnified lens of her long-las.

‘The artillery will change that,’ he remarked.

The enemy were indeed dying. Again, and again. And yet somehow, many of the figures survived, marching on, limping, stumbling, crawling. Some with arms missing from shrapnel or the intense pressure waves. One even continued with half his head missing for several yards before collapsing to the ground. But he noticed that of the few soldiers who endured the bombardment and survived, most still walked with that same unnerving, undaunted shuffle.

Alarmingly, several of the fallen bodies struggled to their feet again. One sported an excessive number of limbs compared to those of a baseline human.

Varis and Alicia exchanged equally bemused looks.

One of the heavy weapons spotters in the main trench suddenly called out target indications, giving range and enemy numbers, followed by the metallic clack and hum of lascannons being readied.

Varis breathed a sigh of relief and looked on with his magnoculars.

Pink light stabbed out into the haze. For a fraction of a second at a time, the gathering dust took on the faint hue of the powerful las-beams as each point of light was fired at the enemy. Heads disintegrated, torsos were rent apart, limbs were seared off. The enemy were struck down in turn.

But still they came.

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