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Gunsight

James Swallow

In all things, readiness is the watchword. Always be prepared to act at a moment’s notice. Always be within a hand’s span of your weapon. Always be ready to make the kill if the prospect presents itself; but be certain of the opportunity. You will only have a moment to make that decision.

It must be flawless.

The pistol was much heavier than he remembered, in his rough, scarred hand. That was a strange thing to consider. He was intimate with this angular, unadorned gun in such subtle ways. He could tell exactly how many rounds were loaded by weight alone. There were six: five in the magazine and one in the chamber. There should have only been five – that was how his instructors trained him and that was the rote command they had taught. The extra round unbalanced the weapon, created unnecessary wear on the mechanism. They would say that there was no need for more than five shots. Who would require more than one?

But they were teachers who were long since gone from the war zones of the galaxy, and they forgot that one extra bullet might be the line between living and dy–

He was drifting. His thoughts were slipping into old memories and trivial minutiae. This was happening too often. Shake it off. He fought to stay in the here and the now. To maintain his focus.

The gun, then. And the target towards which it aimed.

Across the ragged, uneven floor of the hide, the little man was pressed as much as was humanly possible into the far corner. Hands with long, pallid fingers splayed over the metal pallets made into walls, knees bending and cowering on the scrap iron deck. Head bobbing. Those were tears rolling down the dirt-streaked face.

A word. ‘Please…’ Then others. ‘Why would you do this now? After all this time, you want to end me? I thought we had… You and I…’

‘An understanding?’ He plucked the end of the sentence from the air – or was it the whispers that told him what to say? ‘You think you know me?’ His voice was coarse and alien in his own ears, the sound of it like the action of a device long out of use. ‘You do not know me.’

‘We kept each other alive!’ shouted the little man, finding something close to defiance.

What does that mean? The words did not seem to connect to anything. His free hand, the one webbed with void burns, came up and ran over his face, catching in his oily beard and matted hair.

It was not easy. The thing that he knew best, the way to pull the trigger and to kill clean and fast, that pushed at him to be done. He had no calendar to reckon how long it had been since he last took a life.

He wanted to do it. He wanted the gunshot’s roar and the sweet silence afterwards. Not just because he feared that otherwise he might forget the taste of those things, but also because it was required. It is what had to be done to set the last kill – the greatest kill, the unforgotten mission – into motion.

As he saw the shape of that deed in his thoughts, he could not help but look over his shoulder to the other wall of the hide, where his liberation waited wrapped in oilcloth and darkness.

And so he took aim, putting aside the bits of broken memory that accreted in his thoughts.

What are our tools? Rifle. Pistol. Mask. Suit. Cloak. What is not on that list? What do you carve from the landscape of the kill? What is the tool that is always the same but always unique? The hide. Plan as much as you can, but you will never really know the hide until you come to construct it at the site. Your hide may be as ephemeral as mist or as solid as stone. But if it is found wanting, then it will be your grave marker.

What was left of the medicae kit was spent on healing the wounds from the serpent bites and bringing him back to some semblance of stability. He had lost much in the brief, brutal engagement with the foul bilge-predators, including the belt packs that contained his chronometer and data-slate, his primary ammunition pouch, the fluid purifier module and, worst of all, every last wrapper of freeze-dried rations.

In the iron canyons where he found himself, there was nothing human-scale for him to investigate, no sign of habitat quads or barracks where he could conceivably have stolen some kind of sustenance. On a planet, he might have dug for grubs or found a river. Here, inside the endless metal spaces of this gargantuan starship, there was nothing of nature to plunder.

Or so one might have thought at first.

Unable to reckon the passing of ship-days and ship-nights by anything other than his own guesswork, he ventured onwards in fits and starts from the point where he had boarded, eventually leaving it far behind.

After the serpent attack he had briefly returned to the escape pod’s impact point, but found it subsumed under a gelatinous mass of metallic bio-foam where the vessel’s auto reactive systems had plugged the hull breach. Rather than remain in the area should servitors be sent to investigate the penetration, he hiked in the opposite direction for what felt like hours. The mechanical, repeating motion of that helped to calm his mind and make the vivid poison-dreams seem less overwhelming. He would not begin to think of it as a vision until much later.

But in time he came to the canyon that could not be crossed, and although he would have never admitted it, he felt a horrible kind of fear as the view across the black metal abyss came into synchrony with the ghost images that he had seen in the dream.

He stood on a narrow service walkway that had no handrail, following the metal cliff’s edge into infinity. The canyon itself might have run the entire length of the ship for all he knew – a long, echoing hollow buried in the deep bones of the great vessel. To the fore and aft, the chasm vanished into a distant orange glow of working machinery and churning fuel smoke. Looking up and down, there was only unfathomed darkness and, from the vantage where he stood, he hawked up phlegm and spat it out into the void. Cables strung along the length of the great gulf rattled and sang as trains of tethered container cars rolled back and forth below him, pennants of rich chemical smog billowing up from cargos of icy coolant slurry bound for the massive, city-sized reactor cores. Things that he first took to be great patches of rust and discolouration on the sheer iron crags resolved into odd patterns that were hideously familiar.

Instead, he unwrapped the rifle with a lover’s delicacy and peered through the compact viewscope to scry the distance.

His hands were shaking a little. Laser rangers picked out platforms jutting from the walls on either side, each made from a patchwork of metal sheets the size of a hab-block. Rarely, he saw bridges that spanned the full width of the canyon, but the nearest was hundreds of metres above and seamlessly welded into the walls. Without a crawler rig or mag-boots he had no hope of reaching it.

Part of him wanted to put the rifle down and not to look any more. It was the effect of what he had seen when the venom was in him, the strange broken scenes that he had thought were just creations of his temporary fever. He was seeing them again now, for real. The chasm. The iron walls. The bridges and the–

The dream-fear returned when the scope settled on the dais. There it was, as real as death, on the far side of the canyon. One-point-five-three-three kilometres away by reckoning of the rangefinder’s unblinking eye. An ornate, brassy observation platform upon which a ship’s commander might briefly alight upon a tour of the vessel’s lower decks.

He had glimpsed it in the poison-dream and imagined standing upon it. In the storm of unreal images, he had turned as a great shadow fell across him and looked up at a dark figure towering high: a war god wrought of adamantium and black gold. Magnificent, and malignant.

Horus. He has stood there. He will stand there.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Death and Defiance in 2014.
This eBook edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN 978-1-78251-908-9

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