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Those Without Mercy – Extract

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THOSE WITHOUT MERCY

Callum Davis

‘Frekk,’ said Rastus. His voice was tinny and muffled from the old chem-inhaler strapped tightly across his tanned and scarred face.

The Chem-Dog had turned around the corner of a blown-out hab-block and stepped right into the mulching corpse of another of his regiment. The ‘IX’ representing the Ninth Savlar Chem-Dogs, the ‘Bastards of Midas’, was scratched into what remained of the dead woman’s flak armour, barely visible.

Rastus pulled his boot out of the corpse with a squelch and the snap of a rib. It was coated in brown gore and writhing, fat maggots. He knelt down, drew a pot from a pouch he’d sewn to his webbing and unscrewed the lid. He scooped up the maggots with his bayonet and put them in. He could get a good price for them – they cleaned wounds well, if they were kept till then. On the battlefield, when supplies were running low, some Chem-Dogs would just eat them. Some wouldn’t even wait for that. Rations for penal troops weren’t often of the highest quality.

‘Disrespecting our dead?’ came a voice, even more muffled and no less tinny than Rastus’. It was Kazyn. Had he not known her for three campaigns, Rastus wouldn’t have recognised a word she said. Behind her chem-inhaler, she had no teeth. Commissar Hasp had taken one for each time she’d sworn at a Cadian officer who said her boots needed polishing. The ramrod-backed man had run out of teeth to yank out, and so had moved on to her fingernails. When it was pointed out to him that that might make handling her lasgun more difficult for her, he ordered her tied to a post and lashed. A dozen scars now criss-crossed her back.

‘Thanking our glorious comrade for contributing to the God-Emperor’s war effort even in death,’ Rastus said.

‘That one got anything?’ asked Judd, who had joined them. His heavily muscled upper body was covered in burn scars. The other three penal troopers of the squad, Palik, Xiv and Szank, followed him. They stood loosely, staring at Rastus.

‘What the frekk are you doing? An ork could walk up, drain your breather and gut you, and you’d still be staring at me wiping this mess off my boot.’

None of them moved.

‘At least one of you keep a look out.’

None of them moved.

‘This one has nothing except maggots. And they’re mine.’

Szank and Palik turned.

‘There are skidmarks in the ogryns’ latrines with better tactical awareness than you,’ said Rastus, standing up. He shook what he could of the gore off his boot. ‘Keep moving.’

The Chem-Dogs were in a war-torn city that could have been almost anywhere in the Imperium. Standard habs, standard mess halls, standard lav-blocks, standard street pattern. Every building was a ruin. Rockcrete rubble, with bent and tangled plasteel reinforcement poking out of it, littered the cratered roads. Severed cables as thick as an ogryn’s thigh spat sparks like a drunk vomiting up their last bout. Smoke and ash and flies bit at Rastus’ exposed flesh, and glass and bones cracked beneath his boots.

Corpses and body parts, human and ork, were everywhere. Guts and blood stained almost every crumbling wall. The Chem-Dogs and the xenos had battled back and forth for weeks with no side gaining any advantage. Rastus’ squad were part of yet another assault to take Emperor knew what, for Emperor knew what reason. He thanked the Emperor that this time his battalion was in the second wave. The moans of dying Chem-Dogs from the first were carried far by the wind. Explosions and gunfire from further ahead joined them. Overhead flew flights of Thunderbolt fighters and Marauder bombers in tight formations.

There were much more of them when we first got here.

Rastus was grateful not just because being in the second wave meant there was less chance of being killed. It also meant that plenty of Chem-Dogs in the first wave were dead or about to be dead, which meant they could be stripped of valuables and anything they’d left back in their positions was fair game. As he advanced, the two dozen gold teeth Rastus had taken, ork and human, clinked in his backpack. He had three packs of fresh lho-sticks, a finely wrought bayonet with a blade still engraved with the name of the senior Mordian officer it had been liberated from, and more. All of it had been taken from dead and dying Chem-Dogs, who themselves had got it from other Chem-Dogs or from soldiers in other regiments. Best of all, he had several relatively unspoiled pict-capts of various soldiers’ wives and sweethearts. Not one was from the same world. Rastus liked them all and would enjoy getting to know them better.

But not yet. Up ahead was an ork, limping towards them. It was missing an arm, but in its other it carried a blood-caked axe. Its green flesh was plastered in a thick layer of ferrocrete dust and chipped blue paint. Several blue skulls had been daubed over its cracked armour.

‘Xenos,’ he said, stopping and raising his lasgun. ‘Three. Two–’

The others opened fire. Dozens of beads of bright crimson light struck the ork, and it slumped to the ground. Smoke rose from its las-cauterised wounds.

‘Emperor’s balls,’ he muttered, shaking his head.

Rastus knew there was no point admonishing the squad for firing before he’d commanded them. He started walking again. When he reached the dead ork he took out his main knife, a partly serrated blade of black steel he’d lifted from a dead Catachan, who’d said only moments before that Rastus would only get the knife over her dead body. In the event, it was underneath her dead body – he shot her in the back so she fell forward.

He knelt next to the alien corpse, and the others did too. Within a few minutes anything remotely valuable – teeth, weapons, ammunition – was all in the pouches and sacks of one Chem-Dog or another.

‘I get the teeth of the next one,’ said Palik.

‘Frekk off,’ said Xiv. ‘You get what you can get.’

‘If you’re too slow, that’s your fault,’ said Kazyn.

‘Or too weak,’ said Szank, grinning. His teeth were multiple shades of yellow and fake gold. He claimed no two were lifted from the same corpse.

The next few minutes passed in relative silence. They killed two more ork stragglers and a wounded Chem-Dog or two who were past the point of saving. They came to a large, ruined building and entered one by one, checking corners, their eyes peeled and ears straining lest they be ambushed by orks. Rastus split the squad to cover more ground in the warren of corridors and rooms, rendered labyrinthine by destroyed walls, and make it harder for them to all be outflanked and surrounded simultaneously. He led Kazyn and Judd. Xiv took the others.

The din of distant battle, the dripping of water pipes and the echoes of their own footsteps made keeping in voice contact difficult, but Rastus made sure they did, even if it meant doubling back or halting. His heart pounded in his chest. Sweat trickled down his brow and collected where his rebreather mask met his skin, making him itch. He never stopped looking down the iron sight of his lasgun as he advanced.

Something made him stop. A glint of light where it shouldn’t be. A break in the floor pattern. He glanced down, lasgun still pointing forward. A tripwire. Emperor knew how long it had been there or why it was there. At one point there had been a Savlar position here. Some Chem-Dog could even have laid it to protect their stash.

Rastus grabbed Kazyn by the flak when she made to walk past him.

‘What the–’

He nodded towards the floor.

‘Good spot,’ she said with a wink. The way her eyes creased told him she was smiling. ‘I owe you a pack of lho-sticks.’

‘You already owe me a dozen.’

The three Chem-Dogs moved on, each carefully stepping over the tripwire.

Rastus was in a neighbouring room to Xiv when he heard her swear. He ran to her, lasgun – a weapon once belonging to a soldier from Krieg – raised. He saw what had made her shout and lowered his weapon.

There, lying on her back, wounded but breathing, was Commissar von Zek. The woman glared at them, her dark eyes bloodshot.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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Cover illustration by Paul Dainton.

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