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Savage – Extract

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Savage

Guy Haley

Gollph lay still, resolutely trying to wring the maximum amount of sleep out of his limited rest period. There were two factors working against his efforts. The lesser was the deep, rasping snore of First Gunner Meggen, who occupied the camp cot on the other side of the tent. The greater was the blue, pervasive light of the Omdurman predawn already warming the planet to an uncomfortable broil. Gollph was from a hot land, but even he had his limits.

He grabbed his thin pillow and clamped it to his face. It shut out most of the light, but not Meggen’s infernal snoring.

There was no way he was getting more sleep. He groaned and sat up carefully so as not to upset his flimsy bed. The tent canvas flapped listlessly in the damp wind. The days and nights were so short, nine hours apiece. No time to acclimatise to light or dark before it was over.

‘Better get up,’ he sighed. ‘Make the most of the cool.’ He tugged his boots over holed socks and went to lift the tent flap.

Heat dropped on him with the weight of a blanket soaked in boiling water. His physiology was more suited to the conditions than that of the other men who made up the majority of the force, and he coped better than most, but even so, sweat sprang up on his pink skin. There were a lot of listless men in camp, and a lot of officers too listless themselves to force them to work. The sun, yet to crest the horizon, reflected from the orange sky. Gollph stood with the flap open a moment, spitefully hoping the brightening morning and the heat would wake Meggen, but nothing stirred the big man.

‘Snores like a Throne-damned grox,’ he muttered. After several years of service, little trace of Gollph’s feral world accent remained; he sounded more Paragonian than Bosovar now. He let the flap drop, and stepped out into the camp.

It was not long after dawn, the coolest part of the day, but already the temperature was up at thirty grades and climbing.

Omdurman’s tropics were dominated by a roll of plains wrinkled by small hills and scarps, dotted with lakes fringed by lush miniature forests. There was a scarcity of flat ground in the area, and all there was available was occupied by the taskforce landing field, forcing the army to camp on whatever scraps of level ground it could find. The Seventh Paragonian Super-Heavy Tank Company were stationed on one such scrap, alone.

Gollph headed to the hill to the west overlooking the Seventh’s camp. The planet had a reverse spin, and the sun would be climbing the far side. If he hurried, he could catch the sunrise.

In the shadow of the hill, Gollph walked between the company’s four tanks. Ostrakhan’s Rebirth, the command Hellhammer, sat out front. Behind the Hellhammer in a loose laager were the Shadowsword Lux Imperator and the Baneblades Artemen Ultrus and Cortein’s Honour, the last two huddled together like herd animals.

Cortein’s Honour was Gollph’s posting, and he could think of it in no other way than his tank. He didn’t command it – even the thought was a ridiculous presumption – but his position as senior loader made him feel proprietary towards it. Honoured Captain Bannick said he had a clear run at a gunnery position. Gollph wasn’t sure he had the ability for the role, and suspected Bannick was making a point about the skill of the Bosovar. That would be like him.

Artemen Ultrus was four hundred years older than Cortein’s Honour. Gollph’s Baneblade was barely a decade old. But even so young a tank was drenched in history. It was named for an officer who died before Gollph had been drafted from his primitive home world. Its decks were bloodied by the lives lost serving aboard. Its metal interior hid terrible secrets, some of which he shared, and all the guilt that went with it.

On impulse, he reached up and stroked the metal, still warm from yesterday, soon to be heated to untouchable temperature again by the Omdurman sun. Camouflage of dull yellow, green and dark orange had been applied months ago, but the lack of action they’d seen on Omdurman and the regular washes the tanks received from the region’s torrential downpours meant it looked factory fresh. From a few feet away, the armoured panels looked smooth, identical, but up close you could see that the armour was rough with old paint, corrosion and bad casting. At that distance, the tanks’ individuality was obvious, each one as different to the next as one human being to another.

He let his hand drop. Currently, the Seventh didn’t seem like much. The company crews had abandoned their house-sized vehicles to the heat. Their weapons were covered over with protective tarpaulins. Hatches were dogged closed. Engine panels had been removed to prevent heat damage and shielded with mesh to keep out Omdurman’s multiplicity of insects. Access ladders and grab handles provided anchor points for awnings to shade the ground where men lolled. The tank park looked dishevelled, arranged as it was according to the uneven terrain. The super-heavies were drawn up as level as possible so as not to stress their suspension sets while resting. If he’d seen the tanks like this when he was a hunter on Bosovar, and still ignorant of the real world, he’d have thought them strange, but harmless. Back then he had no conception of the sheer destructive power of technology.

He smiled. He remembered that first moment when he’d seen the tanks fight, their engines roaring, guns booming, spear-straight rods of lightning belting from their lascannons. Gollph was far from a coward, but in that second he was terrified. He was also entranced, and elated.

Now the tanks were so quiet they wouldn’t scare a bovid. He felt sorry for them.

Behind the tanks were stacks of Munitorum containers, and past those, maintenance vehicles. All that part of the camp was untidy – a fact that had been commented on by more than one officer in the taskforce. Each time it was brought up, Honoured Captain Bannick had to call out his tech-priest to explain the necessity of their arrangement. If they stayed there much longer, earth-moving equipment would be brought in to resculpt the ground. The Astra Militarum could tolerate untidiness only for so long.

‘There we go,’ Gollph said, patting Cortein’s Honour. The Paragonians, Atraxians and the rest – all these strange men of the stars – said that their machines had their own souls. Gollph couldn’t quite believe it. He had once worshipped an oddly shaped rock, so felt he had something of a unique perspective. Having his own world view blown apart by reality, and roundly ridiculed to boot, made everyone else’s cherished beliefs seem equally improbable.

Even so, he walked quietly away so as not to wake their sleeping spirits, just in case.

In the maintenance yard, men were working in the cool of the morning. Machine tools whined as they bit into metal plating. That was another thing that had frightened him when he’d been drafted. Any kind of machine had filled him with fear. The spacecraft that came to collect him, the troop transport, the ablutorials in the ship – the doors, even.

Some of the other Bosovar never got over their culture shock. Several of those incapacitated by terror had been shot as examples, but the executions could not shake the rest of the afflicted out of their catatonia. Never knowingly wasteful, the Departmento Munitorum found other uses for those Bosovar that could not adjust. Gollph still saw their cyborgised remains mindlessly trudging around, from time to time.

A shower of sparks curved off an angle grinder. More spat from an arc welder at the opposite corner of the yard. The tech-adepts attached to the Seventh had requisitioned the largest flat stretch of the terrain there for themselves. An area of beaten earth stained by oil made up the centre. This space, where they serviced the tanks, was empty, and had been for a long time.

Gollph sauntered across the yard towards the slope. In the shadow of the hill it was pleasantly cool, and dew dampened his boots.

‘Hey! Hey, Gollph!’ The quiet hiss of the arc torch cut out.

Gollph stopped and turned to face the welder, a Paragonian man.

‘Morning, Fulken,’ Gollph said.

‘Morning, yourself, little savage.’ Fulken meant that affectionately; many men didn’t. He stood with one hand on his visor, ready to flip it back down. ‘Shoam’s looking for you.’

‘At this hour?’

Fulken grinned. ‘You know that Savlar, never sleeps. Where you headed?’

‘For a walk,’ said Gollph. ‘If Shoam needs me, he’ll find me.’

‘Fair enough. See you around.’

Gollph waved and headed on.

A few minutes later, he slipped past the picket patrols. He still had his hunter’s skill. Nobody saw him.

As he mounted the slope, the cares of the world slipped from him. He allowed himself to be, just for a while, and put the soldier the Imperium had made him out of his mind. Halfway up the hill, he looked back at the camp. There was such a small amount of activity there. A few shouts and reveille calls sounded, thinned by distance, as insubstantial as the blue wood smoke that threaded the sky over the galley tents. Nobody else was about on the hill.

Quickly, he leant down, unlaced his boots and took off his socks. A slow smile of contentment spread across his face as his feet sank into the damp grass.

‘This is the way man should walk and run,’ he murmured to himself in his own language. He rarely got to speak Bosovar these days. The regiments he had been recruited alongside had been sent elsewhere, so there were only a few of his countrymen left in the taskforce. Those that were on Omdurman were either oddities like himself, fulfilling roles no one expected feral worlders could, or more usually they worked as servants to the higher officers.

With his boots off, Gollph moved fast. He resisted the desire to remove his shirt. There was only so much savagery the commissariat would tolerate.

In no time at all, he broke the line of shadow on the hill’s ridge, and was into the first of the true daylight. The sun was heading rapidly up from the horizon, and its heat hit him hard. He slowed, panting lightly, and laughed.

Even after years and years away from home, they called him a savage still. He worked their machines, he knew their languages, he understood their customs; it didn’t stop them looking down on him. When they saw him, they saw a spear-waving child-man in woven grass clothes. Let them underestimate me, he thought, glorying in the view. They miss so much, these civilised, off-world men.

Trilling his tongue in the old day-greeting of his people, he went to a boulder he favoured, and sat upon it to watch the swift sunrise.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in the Black Library Events Anthology 2018/19 Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-302-4

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