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Fen Guard – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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FEN GUARD

Justin D Hill

Minka rested her shoulder against the open doorway of the stilt-hab, pushed her glare-shields up onto her forehead, squinted out into the growing morning heat.

This planet of Alia’s erratic orbit meant that no sooner had the monsoon passed than the build-up to Flare Season began. The locals said that the intense sunlight would turn an unprotected human to a crisp, and while she had dismissed this at first as non-Cadian exaggeration, now she was starting to believe them.

Flare Season’s peak was still over a month away, but already, just an hour after dawn, the white sun filled half the sky, its heat radiation beating like a steam hammer on the flakboard roof.

There was no one about. No one was stupid enough to be out in the gathering heat. Except Orugi, of course.

He was tanned and topless, soft Militarum cap on his head, doing press-ups and sprints across the yard, body gleaming with sweat, trousers stained dark.

She shielded her eyes and waited till at last he stopped in the shade and poured a canteen over his head and let out a roar of triumph.

‘Is that it?’ she called out.

He took a moment to pick her out from the doorway’s deep shadow. ‘Want to join me?’

‘Paperwork.’

He ran a hand over his face. ‘Authority, huh?’

She nodded. ‘Seen Grawnya?’

‘Last I saw, she was with Father Keremm.’

‘Ask her to come to see me when she’s done.’

Orugi threw the towel across his neck, took a swig from his half-empty canteen, made something approximating a salute as he stalked off.

Minka let out a long breath. Once, all she had to do was maintain her lasgun and powercells, keep her bayonet sharp, and prioritise which of the charging enemy to kill. But with each promotion came stacked responsibility. HQ churned out her body weight in forms and reports every week. Minka was fresh enough to take each report and notification seriously. Guard duty rosters, transfer applications, fresh trooper induction, promotions, petitions, official forms to be initialled or signed. She read through each one, and no matter how quickly she returned them, more came back in response. And all the time they were in the jungle, the forms had been building up, layer by layer, like sedimentary rock.

The stacks lay across one half of her desk, each one weighed down with empty clips and spent shells, the paper corners fretting with the air from the ceiling fan.

Minka sat on her chair and slid the top sheet from the pile. It was the Seventh Company’s casualty list, updated with a few more names of those who had succumbed to injury.

The Cadian Prayer for the Dead was marked in italics across the top, and under it was a dispatch regarding Grawnya’s regiment, printed on green Astra Militarum paper. Minka put it to the side for when Grawnya arrived. Just a single sheet, with barely twenty words printed upon it.

Less than twenty words… So brief, Minka thought, for the weight of the news it bore.

It was nearly an hour later that Minka heard footsteps tramping up the flakboard steps. She took a deep breath, yet it wasn’t Grawnya but Blanchez, pushing her glare-shields up onto her forehead as she stepped inside. She wiped the sweat from her face as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. The company banner hung on the wall behind Minka. Blanchez nodded towards it, pulled up a seat, said nothing for a moment, before picking up the casualty list and putting it back down on the desk without comment.

Minka was on a roll, signing her initials at the bottom of each page and then finishing it off with the Seventh Company stamp.

‘I can’t stand it,’ Blanchez said at last.

Minka looked up as she pulled another sheet from the pile.

‘Second Company this morning. Troopers were laughing. Makes me want to grab them. After everything that’s happened. Obsidian Ridge. All those people we lost.’

Minka nodded. It was hard being in the Cadian Shock Troop. You lost friends, brothers, sisters, rivals, and the world went on despite your loss.

‘They weren’t there,’ Minka said. ‘They didn’t lose anyone. They were here, in base camp. They didn’t see Pinnet’s Watch. They don’t understand.’

Blanchez held her tongue as someone else arrived.

Grawnya stepped inside. She looked from Blanchez to Minka. ‘Captain Lesk. You asked me to come.’

‘Yes,’ Minka said.

‘It’s all right,’ Blanchez said, standing. ‘I was just leaving.’

Minka signalled to the empty chair. Grawnya pushed her damp black hair back from her face, but despite the heat she still wore her Drookian plaid over her Cadian drab. The heavy woollen cloth had been repaired many times. Every las burn, slash or tear stitched back into place with scraps of coloured cloth.

‘How was Father Keremm?’

‘Throne!’ Grawnya said. ‘I’d rather wrestle an ogryn. Sorry, captain. He’s had me there all morning with this heat, and I think my head was not made for letters! We didn’t need letters on Drook. Anything we needed to know we kept up here. Lists of ancestors. Battles. Defeats. We passed it all on from parent to child. Reading was for priests. Not warriors.’

Minka nodded. The Drookians were an auxiliary scouting force. But now Grawnya was with the 101st Cadian Shock Troops, and everyone needed to be fully literate.

‘What’s he got you reading?’

Grawnya rolled her eyes. ‘Collected Sermons from the Masawa Crusade, Volume II. We’re up to Erun Guidi’s third sermon before the Battle of Eagle Gates.’

Minka nodded again. It was the kind of stuff she’d been given at scholam. Mind-numbing, so she’d scrounged a few pulp-press paperbacks for Grawnya. It was simple reading, printed at haste, designed to induct the range of non-Cadian recruits into the Cadian spirit. But it was more rousing. The kind of material that Minka had liked to read in brief moments of spare time: Militarum instruction manuals, lists of battles, first-hand accounts of Militarum campaigns.

Grawnya pulled a rolled-up pamphlet from the folds of her twill-weave garb. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is much better!’

The book cover read: The Life of Ursarkar E. Creed.

‘Maybe you can ask Father Keremm to switch,’ Minka said as she looked for that dispatch. It had become half buried under other forms. She needed both hands to steady the pile. ‘This came this morning,’ she said, and passed the pulp-press paper with its twenty words. ‘It’s confirmation, I’m afraid.’

Grawnya didn’t take the paper. ‘All dead?’

Minka nodded.

‘I felt it. At night their mist-souls marched past me…’ Grawnya paused. ‘They called us the Drookian Seven-Hundred-and-Eleventh, but we were not just a regiment. We were the three clans of Tribe Grindel. My kinsfolk. My family.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Minka said. She pulled one of the drawers of her desk, slid out a half-full bottle of the local jio. She didn’t bother asking but wiped two glasses clean, handed one to the Drookian. ‘Here.’

Grawnya nodded, then knocked the shot back and held the glass out for a second and then a third. At the end, she wiped her mouth on the back of her bare arm and remained staring out of the open doorway into the glaring sunlight.

Grawnya’s loss reminded Minka of her own. From the battle for Kasr Myrak she was one of only two survivors. Her home kasr was just one giant grave into which her past had slipped. Family. Friends. Strangers. All entombed within.

‘No word of Drook?’ Grawnya asked.

Minka shook her head. According to the authorities, the warp had spasmed with shock at Cadia’s fall. There was no word from a whole swathe of the Imperium of Man. This entire crusade was an attempt to reclaim the Gallows Cluster and use it as a launchpad to push heresy back.

‘Nothing yet. Until there is, consider yourself a Cadian. We will be your tribe.’

Grawnya nodded. ‘Thank you. On Drook there were times that a warrior could change clans. It was a moment of great import. The Sacred Season of Wenndan, we called it. You and I are bound together. It seems my fate that I should join the tribe of Cadia.’

There was a long pause, and then the Drookian laid The Life of Ursarkar E. Creed flat upon the desk. She had folded the page, and turned it round to face Minka.

‘Tell me. What does this say?’

A single word had been underlined in black.

‘Wweymyss.’ Minka frowned. ‘Clan Wweymyss.’

Grawnya drew her knife and stabbed it through the word with such vehemence that the blade remained stuck in the desktop. Minka said nothing as the knife trembled between them.

Grawnya’s face was dark as she started to speak. ‘These things happened. I lived it. It is true.’

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