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Blood Sacrifice – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Blood Sacrifice

by Peter McLean

After Baphomet, he was redeployed. There’s no respite in the Astra Militarum, no end to the killing. Not ever.

Death and death and death, the unofficial mantra of the Imperial Guard.

Corporal Cully looked out over the relentless grey of the out-habs, and sighed. Behind him, the main spine of Hive Lemegeton reared majestically into the clouds, but Hive World Voltoth remained one of the most depressing places he had ever seen in his life.

Below the chunk of broken ferrocrete he stood on, One Section dug latrine pits. He caught Steeleye looking up at him. The master sniper’s bulbous, augmetic eye glinted metallically in the polluted twilight before she turned away. Above them, a huge hololithic display flickered with daily production targets, hourly quotas, shift rotation patterns.

‘Toil in the Emperor’s name is a virtue!’ the public address system announced. ‘Sixteen cubic tons of further production required by nineteen hundred hours. Toil in the Emperor’s name is a virtue!’

Cully glanced at his chrono. It was seventeen forty-five, local time. On the manufactorum wall was a mural showing handsome, square-jawed Imperial men and women marching proudly off to war in starched uniforms with freshly stamped lasguns over their shoulders. The caption below read: ‘Their lives are in YOUR hands.’

Hive worlds like Voltoth kept the war machine turning. Cully knew that. Boots, uniforms, flak armour, ration packs. It all had to come from somewhere. The forge worlds turned out tanks and troop ships – but you couldn’t wear those, or eat them. The hives kept the Imperium alive.

They had been there for three months, digging in. Cully was utterly sick of the place. The waiting was the worst. Give him something to kill and he’d be as good as he got, but the waiting was wearing Cully’s nerves to ragged ends.

Away behind him a klaxon blew three long blasts, signifying shift change at another manufactorum. The line of workers waiting to enter stretched the length of the street, all of them bent and hungry-looking in their thin, grey work smocks.

Great doors banged open and the workers trudged inside in double file as the manufactorum excreted the previous shift from another set. From inside, Cully could hear the ceaseless chatter of the power looms.

‘Notice of production quota increase,’ the public address system blared. ‘Overseers to your stations. Toil in the Emperor’s name is a virtue!’

Cully shuddered. This life was exactly what he had hoped to avoid in the Astra Militarum.

He was aware of Steeleye climbing up the ferrocrete to join him, an entrenching tool over her shoulder where in any sane world her long-las would have been.

She paused at the top to spit snot out of the ragged hole where her nose had been before an ork had bitten her face off two years ago, on Vardan IV. That done, she turned to survey the industrial wasteland of smoking manufactoria and crumbling, impoverished dwellings that made up the out-habs.

‘Shithole,’ she pronounced it. ‘I almost miss Vardan Four. At least the jungle was green.’

‘It’s better than Baphomet,’ Cully said quietly.

Steeleye shrugged. ‘Wasn’t there,’ she said.

‘Lucky you.’

‘Sorry,’ Steeleye said. ‘I know you were the only survivor. The sergeant…’

‘Leave it, Steeleye,’ Cully said.

He scratched at the scar on the back of his left forearm, the crude aquila he had carved into his raw flesh with his own bayonet in a moment of post-traumatic madness.

The sergeant, indeed. All Cully’s woes could be condensed into those two words.

The sergeant.

Sergeant Rachain, Cully’s oldest and only real friend, and the best mentor he’d ever had. Cully had killed him himself, on Baphomet. He knew he would never be able to forgive himself for that.

The sergeant.

Sergeant Kallin, Cully’s new leader. Kallin was a tough veteran but he had a bayonet so far up his arse he could taste steel when he coughed. Kallin, who had the best sniper in the entire Reslian 45th digging latrine pits because paragraph six hundred and ninety-four, clause sixteen, sub-clause eleven in the regulations, or whatever it bloody was, declared that fair rotation of fatigue duties applied to everyone regardless of enlisted rank, merit, or having better sodding things to do.

Cully and Kallin, it was fair to say, were never going to get along.

‘Why are we digging in this far behind the perimeter?’ Steeleye asked. ‘There’s miles of out-habs beyond where we’re preparing a front line.’

‘Too many miles,’ Cully said, ‘and not enough of us to hold them. The main spire is the important thing. You know, where the rich folk live. We just need to hold that, and we need to be seen to be holding it. They’re starting to panic already up there, so I hear.’

‘All those workers,’ Steeleye said, gesturing at the manufactoria. ‘Knowing their homes will be abandoned to the enemy when the ork warband arrives, knowing they’re going to lose everything. Working anyway, day in and day out.’

Cully shrugged.

‘They want to eat,’ he said. ‘No production, no rations.’

Steeleye wiped her oozing, ragged snout on the back of her already crusty sleeve.

‘Makes you appreciate life in the Guard,’ she said.

Cully just nodded.

‘We’re the lucky ones,’ he said.

He meant it, but he swallowed all the same. Orks again. They had faced orks on Vardan IV. For three long, grinding years of misery they had fought the greenskins in the reeking jungles, and left over two million of their own dead or missing in action. Now they would face them again.

We’re the Imperial Guard. Dying is what we’re for. Cully had used to tell the new boots that, back on Vardan IV, to spook them. He had thought it was funny at the time, right up until he realised that it was true.

Dying is what soldiers are for.

Death and death and death.

Cully sat down and lit a lho-stick, resting his back on the wall behind him. It was painted with the mural of a proud Guardsman rearing up to hurl a grenade at an unseen enemy. The caption above read: ‘Emperor help me if this is a dud.’ Below, the ever-repeated slogan: ‘His life is in YOUR hands.’

There are only so many times a man can push his luck, Cully reflected. Only so many battles he can survive. Cully had been in the Guard for nearly twenty years, and he wondered just how much luck he had left.

Being forced to kill Rachain had all but finished him, he knew. With the older man at his side Cully had felt invincible. A survivor. An avatar of the Imperial war machine. Without him, he was just a soldier like any other, and he knew how long they lived.

‘We should be grateful,’ Steeleye said after a moment. ‘Without these people, their work, we couldn’t fight.’

‘I know,’ Cully said.

I was good with a power loom. Remember me.

Cully blinked back a tear and took a drag of his lho. Memories of Baphomet were the last thing he wanted just now. Memories of anything. All Cully wanted was something to kill, something to hurt to take his own pain away if only for a little while.

‘Corporal!’ an all-too familiar voice barked. ‘Put that out! No smoking on duty.’

Cully mashed his lho angrily into the ground and made himself stand up and salute, aware of Steeleye doing the same beside him.

‘Yes, sergeant,’ Cully said.

Sergeant Kallin glared at them both, his regulation helmet perfectly set atop his regulation haircut, and his regulation blue eyes shining bright beneath its brim.

‘Why aren’t you working, trooper?’ he demanded.

‘Latrines are done,’ Steeleye growled. ‘Sergeant.’

‘Then find something else to do,’ Kallin snapped. ‘Corporal, detail your section to inspect the ammunition dump. I want every power pack and grenade logged in triplicate and checked against the Munitorum manifest. Jump to it! The enemy makes work for idle hands.’

Kallin turned on his heel and marched away at a regulation pace as the public address system once again intoned that toil in the Emperor’s name was a virtue.

‘His family own a garment manufactorum back home, so I heard,’ Steeleye said.

‘You don’t say,’ Cully said.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.

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