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Trials – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Trials

A Severina Raine story,
by Rachel Harrison

Columns of dirt shake themselves loose from the trenchworks around Severina Raine as she follows the rough-cut tunnel towards Dugout 30. The damp earth scatters against her armour, coat and cap with every heavy detonation from the surface. The Sighted have been systematically bombarding the length of the Antari lines for days in an effort to break through to the port-city of Atraxis, forcing Raine and her regiment, the Eleventh Antari Rifles, to take shelter underground, in the tunnels and dugouts and bunkers of the trenchworks. Raine’s world has become one of cold, dark earth and stale air, of thunder and quaking and palls of dirt as she waits with her troops for the bombardment to break.

Or for something else to.

Raine walks the tunnel, as she does every two hours, checking in on the guard posts and looking into the hollowed caverns and dim-lit chambers where her regiment are billeted. She passes by roughly-hewn caves where the Antari are sitting and eating their half-rations. Some are praying, too, or maintaining their kit. Some are playing half-hearted field-games with hands of cards, or telling stories. All are battered and bruised and bandaged from repelling the ground assaults that are nearly as frequent and systematic as the bombardments. None are sleeping. It’s impossible, with the thunder from overhead. No matter what they are doing, the Antari all stop and look up when Raine passes through. They all acknowledge her. Some do so with softly-spoken words. A murmured ‘commissar’, or ‘sir’. Others do so with a salute, one hand over the heart. The rest simply catch her eyes before quickly looking away again. Raine does not linger. She does not need to. It is enough for her to see the Antari, and for them to see her. So, she keeps going down the tunnel with the thunder and the sound of their lilting songs carrying after her. Dirty water drips down around her and collects on the floor in dark puddles. The air smells of oil and damp and rot, and vermin skitter just out of sight, disappearing into the dark spaces in the earthen walls between the support beams. The string-lumens rattle and turn, making long shadows.

Overhead, the Sighted bombardment continues, unbroken.

Dugout 30 is the last one on the tunnel line, and the smallest posting along the trenchworks. It is old. Older than this war. The ceilings are low and oppressive, supported by thick wooden beams and rockcrete blocks that creak and groan with every detonation from above. The dugout is made up of three distinct areas. A barracks that is big enough to sleep six, but currently sits empty, then an armoury and store room that is nearly as empty as the barracks. Lastly there is a small room that is little more than a cave, used for planning offensives. It is in this room that Raine knows she will find Andren Fel.

The storm trooper captain is sitting in the planning room alone, his hellgun in pieces on the table in front of him, each component carefully laid out and arranged. The barrel is heat-scored and blackened, and the matt-black paint is chipped from the stock. Fel’s carapace armour is much the same. Burned and scored and split in places. Fel has the upper section of the rifle’s receiver in one hand and is using a pin-shaped tool to free one of the internal components with the other. Two tin cups and a pack of dry rations sit on the table beside the component parts of Fel’s rifle.

‘Captain,’ Raine says.

Fel looks up from his work. His face and throat are cut and bruised and his grey eyes are shadowed from lack of sleep. He is still sitting up straight, though. No slouching.

He still smiles at her.

‘Commissar,’ Fel says, and he pushes out the opposite chair with his boot.

Raine takes the seat he offers her, and then takes her canteen from her greatcoat pocket. She fills the tin cups in turn with water. It is lukewarm, with the oily quality of recyc, but it is all that she has left.

‘Thank you,’ Fel says, putting down the rifle’s receiver carefully. ‘Have you eaten anything?’

Raine has to think about it for a moment, counting the time backwards in bombardments.

‘Not since first watch,’ she says.

‘Thought that might be the case,’ Fel says. He cleans his hands on a strip of linen, before opening the dry rations. He snaps the bar in two and passes her half of it.

‘Thank you,’ Raine says, in return.

Fel nods and goes back to working on the rifle’s receiver as Raine breaks up her half of the ration bar. She dips each piece in her own cup of water to soften it before she eats it. The bar is dense and mealy, with the distinct aftertaste of vat-grown protein. It’s something that she somehow finds herself missing when they are aboard the fleet.

‘Is it damaged?’ Raine asks. ‘The rifle?’

‘Not yet,’ Fel says. ‘The focusing crystals just need changing. The output’s so high that it stresses the array. The crystals get fogged, and when they fog they grow weak.’

There’s a soft click, then, and the component gives way. Fel tilts the receiver and lets the crystal array fall into his hand.

‘And then it’s only a matter of time before they break,’ he says.

Fel leans across the table and passes the array over for her to look at. When Raine holds the component up to the lumen light she can see the way the crystals have started to cloud, from the edges inwards. It looks like blood dropped into water.

‘How do you know when they have started to fog?’ she asks.

Fel sets about replacing the array with a new one from his kit. Raine knows that he could rebuild the rifle from scratch, if he needed to.

‘Slight delays in trigger-response. The bolts hiss when they should whisper. Sometimes there’s distortion in the beam.’

‘You just know,’ Raine says.

Fel nods. ‘Aye. You just know.’

A silence falls between them for a moment then, the sound of the bombardment growing to fill the space. Raine finds herself thinking about what the surface must look like, now. She has seen enough warzones to know that there will be little left of the Atraxian Plains but blasted, black earth. The agri-pastures will be gone. The irrigation canals. Even the remains of the dead will have been made as earth by the constant shelling. No need for graves.

‘I spoke with General Keene earlier,’ Raine says. ‘She said that the civilian evacuation is taking longer than they expected.’

Fel nods. ‘I heard. The word from Operations is another two days.’

‘Then we should expect it to be three.’

‘Sure enough,’ Fel says, without a trace of bitterness in his voice. ‘Whatever it takes. Whatever He asks of us.’

It’s the kind of answer Raine has come to expect from him. Andren Fel isn’t the kind to flinch, or to falter. It is part of the reason that Raine trusts him in a way that she cannot trust anyone else. Certainly not the rest of the regiment. She thinks of them then, sitting in the bunkers and the dugouts, singing their songs and their praises. She thinks about their bruises and bandages and their hollow grey eyes. The dead they have had to leave for the barrage to bury. She might not be able to trust the rest of the Rifles, but she can read them easily. Anticipate their actions. It is what she was trained for. What she was made to do. Just like Fel does his rifle, Raine knows how people look and act and sound in the instant before they break, and she knows exactly what to do when it happens. That, too, is something that she was trained for at the scholam on Gloam. Raine remembers each of her trials keenly. The lessons learned and what was asked of her. In that moment, though, she finds herself thinking of one in particular.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by John Michelbach.

Trials © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Trials, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-407-0

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