Legion (17 page)

Shit, thought Grammaticus. His logokine skills had wrong-footed the Lucifer Black for a moment, but
only
a moment. Clearly, the elite companions possessed iron-willed, unsuggestible minds. The Lucifer had already questioned the encounter, and realised he had been tricked.

The Lucifer Black was armoured. Grammaticus was not. Grammaticus couldn’t count on landing a clean, quick kill-blow, nor could he risk using his digital ring-weapon. The energy flare would set off every alarm within ten metres.

As the Lucifer turned back, Grammaticus threw a wolf-paw jab that crushed the vox-hub bulge on the side of the Lucifer’s jet-black helmet, preventing him from signalling an alert. The Lucifer began to shout, but his voice was muffled by the helmet’s padded snout. Grammaticus rammed another jab in under the chin of the helm and crushed the man’s larynx, rendering him mute.

Grammaticus briefly hoped that the larynx punch might also prove to be a killing strike, but the Lucifer was made of stronger stuff. His sabre was still drawn, and he slashed at Grammaticus. Grammaticus blocked the blade with the adamantium strips woven into the forearm sleeves of his bodyglove, and drove the palm of his right hand flat into the Lucifer’s breastplate, a tension-reflexive strike that the eldar called the
ilthrad-taic
or breathless touch. The Lucifer lurched, his breastplate cracking. As he stumbled backwards, Grammaticus looped his left hand around the Lucifer’s right wrist, and whip-snapped it, forcing the sabre out of the man’s grip. It landed on the sand, a bare centimetre short of one of the ground level sensor beams.

The Lucifer was not yet done. Grammaticus had been forced to close tightly, and the Lucifer headbutted him. Grammaticus lurched backwards, pain engulfing the centre of his face as the helm crunched into him. He staggered, and barely avoided an overhead beam. The Lucifer fumbled and drew his sidearm, his broken right wrist forcing him to use his left hand, across his body. As soon as the laspistol came clear of its holster, Grammaticus threw a spin kick that sent it skidding away into the night beyond the tent. He flinched as the tumbling weapon passed between two strands of the invisible security web.

This had to end, fast, before something got tripped. They were so tightly boxed in it was like fighting inside a spider’s web, and any wrong move would bring the spider pouncing down on them.

The Lucifer threw a steel-shod fist at Grammaticus, who ducked left, and chopped a passing body-blow into the Lucifer’s ribs. Grammaticus’s hands, trained and subcutaneously strengthened though they were, were already sore and bloody from punching armour. Grammaticus tried to get behind the Lucifer, but the Lucifer caught him and clenched him in a choke hold. It would have finished the fight, except that the Lucifer was struggling with just one working hand.

Grammaticus grunted and corded his neck muscles to ward against the Lucifer’s choke. Training and experience told him there was one clean way out of the hold, a body throw that would hurl his opponent up and over him. But his goggles saw a sensor beam running right in front of them. If he threw the Lucifer, his opponent’s body would land across the beam.

He kicked back hard instead, and the back of the Lucifer’s head struck against one of the taut, diagonal guy wires of the pavilion. The impact snapped the Lucifer’s head forward, and he involuntarily butted the back of Grammaticus’s skull. Grammaticus winced, but the choke-hold broke. He swung around, dazed by the blow, and shot out a straight-fingered jab.

The middle and index fingers of John Grammaticus’s right hand punched through the left lens of the Lucifer’s helmet and popped the eye behind it. The Lucifer, gurgling through his useless throat, fell backwards against the tent side and slid down in a heap.

Grammaticus paused, crouching low, ready to sprint away if the impact raised an alarm.

No alarm came.

Grammaticus began to straighten up.

The Lucifer flopped forwards, matter dripping like glue from his ruptured eye socket, and began to crawl across the sand.

Grammaticus realised the Lucifer was dragging himself towards one of the ground level beams, his armoured hand clawing out to break it.

He threw himself onto the Lucifer’s back, grappling with him, trying to pull the arm back. The Lucifer was monstrously strong. He dragged Grammaticus with him as he crawled across the sand, straining to reach the harmonic tripwire.

Vicing an elbow around the reaching, straining arm of the man underneath him, forcing it to pull short, Grammaticus drove another jab into the man’s spine. Something cracked. Still, the Lucifer heaved himself forwards, ten centimetres from the beam, five, the outstretched fingers shaking as they groped for the invisible cord.

Grammaticus saw the Lucifer’s discarded sabre lying on the sand beside them. He grabbed it, simultaneously wrenching the man’s reaching arm back and up with all of his strength. He hacked with the sabre, and took the Lucifer’s limb off mid forearm.

The Lucifer convulsed under him. He reached out towards the beam with his stump, but he was well short of touching it. Grammaticus hastily clamped his left palm around the severed stump and compressed to stop the jetting arterial spray from hitting the beam and accomplishing what the Lucifer’s outstretched hand had not.

The armoured body under him went into spasm. Grammaticus pinned it down with his legs and kept the stump clenched tight. He felt the hot blood surging against his palm.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

The Lucifer trembled. Grammaticus put the tip of the sabre against the nape of his neck, in the tiny gap between helmet lip and collar armour, and pushed. The blade slid clean through the neck and bit deep into the sand beneath.

The Lucifer went still. Grammaticus waited until the pressure pulse against his palm finally ebbed away, and then let go of the stump. The truncated arm flopped onto the sand.

Grammaticus rose to his feet. The stench of blood in the night air was overpowering. Some of it, a little of it, was his own. His fists were swollen and mangled. Blood seeped from his battered face, and pain made him see double. His skull throbbed from the blows it had taken. He was sure his nose was broken.

He tried to steady himself. He felt sick. There was no chance of him continuing with his surveillance now. The Lucifer would be missed soon enough. Grammaticus had to get away, fast.

He moved away from the body, stepping over the tracery of sensor beams his goggles revealed, and stumbled away into the desert and the enfolding night.

D
INAS
C
HAYNE PAUSED
. Alpharius was busy talking to Namatjira and the assembled lords about ‘warding countermeasures’. Chayne wasn’t listening any more. A signal light was flashing on the jet-black cuff of his suit.

He slipped back behind the gathering and made his exit through the service tent.

Outside, under the Nurthene stars, he put his helmet back on and triggered the vox.

‘Chayne. You signalled?’

‘Vital trace from Zeydus lost.’

‘Report his last position.’

‘West side of the pavilion, twenty metres north of the West Porch.’

‘Route two men to that position. From the reserve, not the ones stationed with the Lord Commander.’

‘I obey.’

Chayne moved off down the west side of the huge pavilion, carefully stepping over and around the light-beams his visor showed to him. He drew his sabre.

‘Trouble?’ a voice asked from behind him.

Chayne whirled. The tip of his blade made a tiny
ching
as it grazed against the chest plate of the Astartes who had appeared, miraculously, behind him.

The huge armoured warrior looked down at the sabre tip pressing against his chest armour.

‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Very quick. Dinas Chayne, isn’t it?’

‘You know me?’ Chayne asked.

‘The Legion likes to know everyone.’

‘You’re Omegon.’

The Alpha chuckled, his laughter carried oddly by his helmet speaker.

‘You’re good, Dinas Chayne. We heard this about you. Yes, I’m Omegon. I saw you leave the tent in a hurry.’

‘You saw me?’

‘I was watching you. You, you were watching me. Don’t pretend you weren’t now.’

‘I won’t.’

‘We love the same things, I think, Dinas.’

‘Such as?’

‘Caution. Secrecy. Stealth.’

‘How do you know my name?’ Chayne asked. ‘The names of the Lucifers are never published.’

‘Oh, come on, Dinas. Do we look like amateurs to you?’

‘No.’

‘You can put that away, I think,’ said Omegon.

Chayne withdrew his sabre. The tip had actually buried itself in the Astartes’s chest plate and it took a tug to remove it.

‘Any other man I’d have killed for less,’ said Omegon, looking down at the dent, ‘and, by the way, that’s all you get.’

Chayne shrugged.

‘Why did you leave the pavilion in such a hurry?’

‘One of my men is down.’

‘Let’s see, shall we?’

The Alpha legionnaire led the way. Chayne realised, with alarm, that the Astartes was cheerfully striding through the serried sensor beams, breaking them without setting any of them off. Chayne followed, hopping and stepping over the harmonic tags.

‘Something on your mind?’ Omegon called over his shoulder.

‘You are invisible to our security lattice,’ Chayne replied.

‘Like I said, Dinas, do we look like amateurs to you?’ He paused. Two men were approaching, the two Lucifers Chayne had sent for. Chayne raised a hand to indicate they should stay back.

Omegon crouched down. ‘Is this your man?’ he asked.

Zeydus lay face down beside the tent wall in a patch of blood-stained sand. His left arm had been severed above the wrist, and he had been pinned to the ground with his own sword. The hilt of it was almost flat to the nape of Zeydus’s neck.

‘Yes,’ said Chayne. He bent down beside the Astartes.

‘Quite a fight,’ said Omegon, pointing idly. ‘His assailant crippled his vox to mute him. Right wrist is snapped, probably a disarming move.’

Omegon wrenched the sabre out and rolled the corpse. ‘Muted him too, larynx punch. The eye’s gone as well. Spine’s snapped, between the third and fourth vertebrae. See? Someone did a good job here.’

Chayne nodded. Zeydus had been one of his best.

‘I thought you Lucifers were meant to be tough?’

Chayne bridled.

The Astartes laughed. ‘Relax. I know you’re tough. I just meant, whoever did this, he did it with his bare hands.’

‘What?’

‘That blood there, on the vox bulge. That’s the assailant’s. He crushed it with his fist.’

‘You can read that?’

‘Rudimentary typing via optics. Yes, I can read that. We should take a sample for proper gene analysis. But on first look, I’d say your man was taken out by an unarmoured human.’

Chayne straightened up.

‘Tell me, Dinas,’ said Omegon, looking up at him, ‘who do you know that could do a thing like that?’

‘No one,’ Chayne replied. His reply was honest, but he had his suspicions.

A
LL ALONG THE
earthwork of the Imperial fortifications, huge watch fires crackled, and a million campfires twinkled between them. Overhead, a cloud-scudded night sky turned slowly, retrograde.

The night air was hot. Around their campfire, under their lank banner, the Carnivales were laughing, and passing the bottle.

‘So Lon made it?’ Kaido Pius asked.

Peto Soneka took a swig from the bottle that came by and nodded. ‘He did, like I said.’

‘Good old Lon,’ laughed Tinq, one of Pius’s bashaws. ‘Nothin’ll ever kill Lon.’

Soneka nodded, took another pull from the bottle, and handed it on. Behind him somewhere, men were playing loud Gnawa on hand drums and ghimbris. Someone had thrown incense flakes into the camp-fires, and sweetened the smoke.

‘Ah, but it’s good to see you, Peto,’ Puis said, taking a swig of liquor and then belching triumphantly.

‘You too, Kai,’ Soneka laughed.

‘What will you do?’ asked Bashaw Jenz.

Soneka shrugged. ‘I dunno. Find another outfit that can use a few officers? I’m not worried about myself. I just want to make sure Lon and the others get placed all right.’

‘Room for you all here,’ said Pius.

Soneka shook his head. ‘No room for two hets like me and you in this outfit, Kai,’ he chuckled. ‘We’d end up fighting to the death.’

‘Maybe,’ admitted Kaido Pius.

‘You know it.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You know it, Kai. Terra, you’re a good friend and generous to a fault. I thank you for that. But I’m gonna hold out, maybe rebuild the company, maybe petition the uxors for a new one. Fug, what is this we’re drinking?’

‘Jenz’s homebrew,’ Pius replied, regarding the bottle he was clutching groggily. ‘It’s basically pure alcohol—’

‘With a secret mix of herbs and spices,’ Jenz added. ‘My gene-da’s special recipe!’

‘You gene-da clearly had sanity issues,’ Soneka told him.

Pius snorted.

‘I’ve been meaning to catch up with Hurt,’ said Soneka. ‘I haven’t seen him since I got here. He’s around right? The Jokers are here?’

Pius nodded. ‘Yes, Bronzi’s here.’

‘The Jokers are camped at line ten south, I think,’ said one of the bashaws.

‘What about Dimi Shiban?’ Soneka asked, trying to make the question sound natural. ‘You seen him?’

No one had. Despite the liquor in his system and the blazing fires, Soneka felt cold.

‘Well, my friends,’ he said, getting to his feet unsteadily. ‘I have to drain now, secret mix or no secret mix.’

Pius and his men laughed and booed Soneka as he meandered away from the campfires in search of the latrine trench. The raucous Maghrebi rhythms of the Gnawa fell away behind him, and the hot, scented smoke thinned into cold, spare desert air.

‘That’s Soneka,’ said Roke, passing the night-vision scope to Boone.

Boone took a look for himself, training the scope down the embankment towards the field of campfires.

‘Yup. So he’s hanging out with Pius, is he?’

‘He’s got no one else to hang out with,’ said Roke sourly. ‘All of his Dancers are bones in the desert.’