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Blood Sands – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Blood Sands

Victoria Hayward

The desert was singing to Sergeant Aisha Itoh.

She drifted in semi-consciousness, the strange resonances of Fervens’ desert in her ears.

She remembered General Aegus once explaining what caused the harmonies. It had been during a long evening on the local mezik, so it was a little blurry – something about the compression of air in the shifting blood-red sand? She trusted he would know. He’d been in this inhospitable place from the start, when the regiment had been deployed into the dusty heat to combat the cult uprising.

The general’s face drifted into her mind’s eye. Jovial, reassuring, the father of the regiment. He was trying to say something to her now, but she couldn’t quite hear…

Itoh’s eyes flew open, and she was suddenly, painfully conscious.

Her recon company was being ambushed.

Blood rushed to her head, her ears ringing with gunfire as reality flooded in. She was hanging awkwardly in her harness, her Sentinel pitched forward, plasma cannon embedded up to the accelerator coils in sand.

Smoke was everywhere, the air thick with the stench of burning promethium.

The desert wasn’t singing – that sound was her fellow Dune Eagles screaming.

Craning round, she saw a biker roar past, shrouded in scarves and goggles which couldn’t hide the ridge of bone deforming its forehead.

Itoh reached instinctively for the trigger on the Sentinel’s control column, but stopped. ‘Throne,’ she spat. Fuel cells in burning-hot sand were guaranteed to overheat.

Something exploded off to her left. Shrapnel screamed past in the wake of a frag grenade. Squinting, she saw Sergeant Emoor’s Sentinel stagger a few steps before going down in front of her. Immediately, cultist saboteurs swarmed the stricken walker.

‘No!’ Itoh snarled, a knife of horror stabbing into her heart. In spite of herself, she reached for her trigger – overheating fuel cells be damned. The submerged weapon belched plasma into the sand, melting the silica into a roiling tide of molten glass that rolled into the attacking cultists.

The cannon’s backwash began boiling its own fuel cells, their casing moaning under the strain. Itoh swore, slamming her hand against the chest-release mechanism of her harness. She had seconds before the cannon blew. Dropping out of the Sentinel, she rolled onto the sand and ran, the whine of superheating plasma filling her ears.

Cultists’ bullets sprayed around her feet, but Itoh kept running, pelting alongside the distorted serpent of cooling glass her cannon had melted. Radiant heat glowed from it, turning the soles of her boots tacky, the scorched air and fumes burning her lungs.

She was coming up fast on Sergeant Emoor’s downed Sentinel – cover from the imminent blast. The overheating plasma cannon gave a final, terrible scream, and Itoh threw herself behind the crumpled cockpit of the walker.

The explosion roared, spraying shards of fused glass into the battered Sentinel. A ruined wheel from a cultist’s dirtcycle slammed into the sand nearby.

When the rain of debris slowed, Itoh fumbled for her laspistol. Her fingers were slick with blood where the glass had clipped her arm, but there was no time to look at the injury. She wiped her hand on her fatigues and crawled into the Sentinel’s empty cockpit. There was no sign of Emoor. Itoh peered up over the roll cage, resting the barrel of her laspistol on the ledge. The cabin hull obscured her view to the left, and over to the right was the high ravine leading back to headquarters.

Two dirtcycles growled, the sound coming from her blind spot, followed by the familiar percussive report of an autocannon as a pair of Sentinels strode into view. Itoh almost laughed with relief. The idents stencilled on the cockpits told her that her comrades Kozak and Blythe were piloting.

They made short work of the riders, but Itoh sighted a Wolfquad coming up on their rear, its mining laser swinging towards the Sentinels. It was a long shot, but she wasn’t known as the unit’s dead-eye for nothing. She fired and the cultist was thrown backwards off his vehicle, his malformed cranium bursting like an overripe ploin fruit.

‘Not today, scum,’ she hissed.

With the enemy dead and the throb of adrenaline receding, Itoh surveyed the scene. Blast-marks stained the sand at regular intervals along the desert road. Enough explosives had been planted to take out both the company’s squadrons.

Itoh slid out of the cockpit and back into the desert, plumes of black smoke drifting overhead. This had been an ambush, that much was clear. But the Dune Eagles had been despatched urgently, secretly. How had they been found? They had deliberately avoided any chatter on comms about the mission, given the cult’s ability to crack them.

She holstered her weapon and strode out from the cover of the fallen Sentinel. She almost stumbled at what she saw. The lieutenant’s walker was wrecked, blackened and smoking thirty feet away. It must have taken most of the blast.

And in front of it lay the remains of Sergeant Emoor where she had been thrown from her Sentinel.

Her torso had been separated from her legs. What was left of her upper body lay face down, arms flung forward as if reaching for something. Walking trance-like through the wreckage, Itoh knelt in the sand beside the dead woman, placing her hand gently on the back of her head, feeling her soft dark curls under her fingers. She saw that Emoor’s hands were embedded in the sand, bruised and broken. Those clever, strong hands that had frequently mended pistons and valves and servos. That had tended with reverence and love to the machine spirit of the Sentinel lying irretrievably broken, like its pilot.

Itoh threw back her head and howled.

And then her training slammed into place – a steel wall dropping down, severing her from her emotions. Save that rage, her training told her. Put that pain away or it will get you killed.

Taking in shuddering breaths, Itoh felt the sand burning beneath her knees. That was real. Focus on the pain you can do something about. She pulled the ident tags from around Emoor’s neck and stood up, turning to find Kozak and Blythe behind her. Their sombre faces were streaked with grease, protective goggles pushed up onto their foreheads.

‘Lieutenant’s dead, too,’ Kozak said. ‘You’re in command of the Dune Eagles now, sir.’

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