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The Enemy of my Enemy – Extract

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The Enemy of my Enemy

Nate Crowley

Nestor blinked away ash-brown rain and tried to imagine, for the fourth time that day, the words with which he would accept his promotion.

The scene was clear in his head: the immense basilica, drenched with light and cheering, the warm kiss of metal as the laurels were set on his brow. But the words would not come. He stood dumbstruck, gaping like a fool before the glaring statues of his forebears. Could he not even muster a little dignity here, in the safety of his daydreams?

Something gave way beneath his boot and he stumbled, dashing the image from his mind. It was the chest of a Guardsman – some unfortunate wirecutter, sunk in the mire and plastered over with battlefield filth. Nestor retched as the stench billowed up from the carcass, but soon steadied himself. The last thing he needed was to lose his stomach in front of Phocus.

‘General Pyrrhus?’ chirped the younger officer from behind Nestor, his voice a perfect facsimile of loyal concern.

‘I’m well, Colonel Phocus,’ he growled, straightening himself and scraping the worst of the muck from his boot. ‘Just acquainting myself with the mood among the troops,’ he added in a mutter to himself, before setting his jaw and looking forward.

Cavernam Tertius was a bloody mess. A mining world that had never lived up to the hopes of the explorators, it had been a dreary backwater even before it had been visited by war. Now, it was little more than a cesspit. But with the segmentum shipyards ever hungry for ore, it was a cesspit which the Mystras VIII, the Golden Eighth, had been consigned to defend for the last ten miserable years.

Frankly, it was madness to stay. Nestor had often, to his dismay, calculated the cost of defending the world: the squandered ammunition alone almost outvalued the meagre ore shipments it guaranteed, while the human disbursement did not bear considering.

Fortunately, the Departmento Munitorum, in its star-spanning majesty, had no appetite to consider it. The immense bureaucracy dealt with arithmetic on a stellar scale, provisioning wars on fronts light years long. On that measureless counting board, Cavernam Tertius was just a drab speck, a bead on the abacus of some lowly, cable-faced wretch. Nestor and all the men and women of the Eighth – of every other regiment in his battlegroup – were insignificant figures, liable to be swept away in a carried digit.

Of course, this would all be bad enough, thought Nestor, if the enemy had some desperate need to take this world. Some relic they were sworn to recover, or a holy city they would give everything to possess. Indeed, anything that could be denied them by the stalwart defenders of mankind. But this was not the case. As Nestor gazed past the water running from the brim of his cap, at the jagged earthworks and belching smokestacks of the enemy lines, he knew the awful truth: they were just here for the fun of it all.

Despite it all, Nestor managed a tight little smile for himself as he resumed his trudge through the bog and signalled for his staff to follow. The stalemate was about to end. And it was going to end in a fashion that nobody – not the drones of the Munitorum, nor the brutish cretins waiting in the trenches ahead, and certainly not that conniving bastard Phocus – could have foreseen. No, this appalling little war was going to end on his terms. And in the slim eventuality he didn’t end up a drinking companion to that poor wirecutter in the mud, it would be the making of his name.

‘Lord General Militant Pyrrhus,’ he murmured under his breath as he reached the agreed spot. ‘Lord General Militant Pyrrhus,’ he repeated, rattling through the words in the same way his men would invoke the Throne before a big push, and closed his eyes. He let the warm light of the basilica linger behind them for a moment, then opened them and thrust his arm into the dull, brown sky.

‘Pax!’ he cried, and let the white rag bunched in his fist unroll into the drizzle.

A long moment of nothing passed – nothing but the sound of the rain, tapping on his epaulettes and spattering the shell-crater puddles. Nestor stood with his head back and his chest out, ready to be split by a bullet, but none came.

Then the xenos appeared. They rose from nowhere, as if from beneath the sludge, unfolding from their haunches until they towered over Nestor’s party. Seen through binoculars, they had always seemed crooked and hunched – awkward, scurrying things. Up close, however, with little more than a lasrifle’s length to keep them at bay, they were monsters.

It wasn’t their size that was so intimidating. Nestor had dealt with renegade ogryns that would have outmassed these things twice over, and for all their bulk, they had just been bigger targets. No, there was something innately threatening about the xenos – something more primally awful about their proportions. Their gangly, sinew-bunched arms, the blunt enormity of their jaws, made them something out of a child’s night terrors – things that wanted to reach out of the dark, pull you away and gobble you up…

Luckily, it took more than monsters to rattle the Golden Eighth. Before the beasts had even risen past their knees, Nestor heard Vatatze’s hellgun power up with a shriek, and the old NCO had leapt out in front of him in a firing crouch. He was grateful as ever for the staff sergeant’s reflexes, but a firefight now would doom them.

‘Stand down,’ cried Nestor to Vatatze, waving a hand at the long rifles slung on the backs of the xenos. ‘They’re snipers. If they’d wanted us dead, they’ve had this whole bloody walk from the trench to put holes in us.’

‘It’s just a ploy,’ added Phocus, uninvited, to the whole of the cohort. ‘They’re trying to put the wind up us while we wait for the parley, is all. Don’t let the brutes get in your head!’

Nestor was furious at the colonel’s interjection. To be talked over in front of his staff was bad enough – but in front of the bloody xenos? The little turd just couldn’t wait to step into his boots, could he? He considered a reprimand, but this was not the time.

Besides, it was hard to concentrate on anything with those dull red eyes regarding him. The beasts had not moved since rising from the mud. Even with Vatatze’s hellgun sweeping across them, they had just stood there, staring with expressionless curiosity, like predators behind plasglass. Nestor hated to admit it to himself, especially after Phocus’ little speech, but they did put the wind right up him.

Particularly uneasy was the fact the enemy was fielding snipers at all. Every tactical codex Nestor had read suggested they preferred to fight at close quarters or, if firearms were involved, via wild onslaughts of mass automatic weapons. The Cavernam posting had soon revealed otherwise. After the first few heads had popped with no enemy in sight, Nestor had quietly amended his manuals, and the men of the Eighth had kept their heads well below the trench parapets.

Examining the sniper closest to him, he wondered how they had never been spotted in the field – especially now, when his party had been walking almost within arm’s length of them. The creature in front of Nestor was a good head taller than him, and it was by no means the largest of the group: the one standing a few feet to the right must have been half the size of a bull grox. And although they wore long sniper’s cloaks, they were little more than gaudy rags, covered in wild splashes of colour like a fool’s mockery of his own regimental camouflage.

‘Staff sergeant,’ said Nestor softly, beckoning the scowling woman to his side, ‘am I losing my eyesight? Look at the colours on those cloaks, and tell me how in the name of Holy Terra we didn’t see these skaffers a mile off.’ Vatatze shrugged and wrinkled her scarred brow, running her eyes across the line of xenos with a look of contempt.

‘Beats me, general. I dunno – you know what they say in the trenches, though.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Word is they’re born like that, sir. They grow underground like fungus, then just pop out from the puddles, gear and all. That’s why we send ’em back there, sir. Doing ’em a favour.’

Nestor replied with a grunt of grim amusement, then fell silent as he noticed, to his immense discomfort, that the sniper was trying to catch his eye. The beast had clearly caught him frowning in consternation at its cloak, and had dipped its head to stare right into his eyes. And although the leathery wasteland of its face was impossible to read for human emotions, he could have sworn on the aquila that it was giving him a knowing smirk.

Withstanding the urge to shiver, Nestor tore his eyes away from the monster, and looked towards the xenos front line. Aside from the usual plumes of smoke from engines and cook fires, the enemy trenches were still eerily quiet. The wind was picking up now, the rain smacking against them in fat streaks, and Nestor felt a cold stab of doubt. There was still no sign of the enemy commander. What if it wasn’t coming at all?

After another minute of unbearable silence, the men began to murmur. Clearly, they were beginning to have similar doubts. He would have to put a stop to things before he was undercut by Phocus yet again. Turning his back to the bestial snipers while Vatatze stared on at them, Nestor straightened himself to address his soaked-through comrades, radiating parade-ground confidence despite his clenching guts.

‘We give it ten minutes from here,’ he decreed, making a point of glancing at his timepiece, ‘and then we make a controlled retreat to our lines. Colonel Phocus will lead, while Staff Sergeant Vatatze will bring up the rear with me. Until then, we wait in silence. Am I understood?’

‘Very clearly, general’ said a voice as low and rumbling as distant shell fire, and Nestor felt his shoulders stiffen. Spinning on his heel, he scanned the wasteland for the source of the voice, but they were still alone with the snipers. Then the voice came again, this time with a guttural chuckle, and Nestor’s eyes shot to the largest of the beasts. In their savage hierarchy, leadership was determined by size alone (‘large means in charge’ was the mnemonic drilled into the marksmen of the Eighth) so surely it was their leader? But the hulk stood sullenly silent.

‘I’m here,’ said the voice from a few feet to the left, and Nestor could barely believe the evidence of his eyes as they flicked to its source – it was the sniper who had smirked at him, calmly addressing him in serviceable Low Gothic.

‘And may I say,’ it continued, the words bubbling up from deep in its boulder chest, ‘what a pleasure it is to meet my adversary in the flesh at last. Shall we… make parley?’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Inferno! Volume 1 in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Leo Lesfargue.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-888-3

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