The detention officer looked scared and bewildered. His hair was messed up and his jacket was buttoned up wrong. He looked like someone who had just woken from a bad dream.
Through the open bay door behind him, they could all hear the sirens much more clearly.
The detention officer took a last look at them, as if he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be doing.
‘Stay here,’ he told them, and ran back out, pulling the hatch shut behind him.
Varl looked through the bars at Rawne.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes people say the stupidest things.’
The shots outside made them start and tense: two shots, just on the other side of the hatch. Instinctively, all of the Ghosts backed away from the fronts of their cages.
‘What the hell’s happening?’ the Varshide trooper mumbled.
The cell bay hatch opened again. From outside, they could hear shouting, clattering footsteps and repeated gunfire.
Kaylb Sirdar swung in through the detention block hatchway, his carbine raised.
Prisoners. The sirdar saw prisoners, just prisoners in cages, all staring at him in pathetic terror. Check them. Find the pheguth. Kill the pheguth. Kill anyone who wasn’t the pheguth. The men of his element were spreading out through the bays of the cellblock doing just that. He could hear the shots.
The sirdar stepped forward. He saw the eyes staring back at him, wild, animal eyes; caged men who recognised death when it approached.
Rawne watched the man approach. He took in the ragged, dirty combat gear, second- or third-hand at least, the purposeful pose, the confident, well-trained advance. Only one detail mattered. The scowling iron mask that the man was wearing over his face identified him very clearly. It was the fighting grotesk of a Blood Pacted warrior.
He heard Cant whisper, ‘Holy Throne.’
The sirdar reached the first cage. He had the carbine’s stock tucked up against his shoulder, aimed down and wary. He stared at the blinking Varshide trooper through the bars.
‘Who are you supposed to be?’ the Varshide slurred.
Kaylb fired between the bars of the cage. The two shots hit the Varshide in the chest, and threw him against the back wall of the cage. His corpse overturned the cot and the covered chamber pot beside it as it crumpled onto the cell floor. The sour smell of stale urine filled the cell bay, and mingled with the acrid reek of scorched flesh and cooked blood.
The next cage in line was Rawne’s. Rawne didn’t move as the killer advanced towards him. He kept his eyes locked on the grotesk.
Kaylb looked the next prisoner up and down quickly, and then raised the carbine to execute him.
‘Voi shet, magir!’ Rawne said.
Kaylb froze.
‘Ched qua?’ he replied.
‘Voi shet, magir,’ Rawne repeated, stepping closer to the bars, his hands open and visible. ‘Eswer shet edereta kyh shet.’
Kaylb came closer, the gun still aimed at Rawne’s chest.
‘Shet atraga gorae haspa?’ he demanded. ‘Voi gorae haspa?’
Rawne smiled, and said, ‘Fuad gahesh drowk, magir.’
‘Ched?’ the sirdar queried.
‘Abso-fething-lutely,’ said Rawne and shot his arms out through the cage. His left hand grabbed the carbine’s barrel and yanked it in between the bars. The weapon fired, but the shot struck the back wall of the cell, harmlessly. Rawne’s right hand had seized the sirdar by the collar. Taken by surprise, the sirdar found himself being dragged headfirst into the cage door. Rawne slammed him into the cage so they were face to face with only the bars between them. Though the sirdar still had his right hand clamped to the carbine, most of the weapon was pulled through the bars and wedged against them by Rawne’s vicing left-hand grip. The weapon fired again. Two more futile las-bolts left scorch marks on the back wall.
It was all happening too fast for the sirdar. Kaylb started to cry out, to fight back. He clawed at Rawne through the bars with his left hand.
Teeth bared, Rawne began to slam the sirdar’s face against the bars with his right hand. His grip on the collar was so tight that he was already choking off the man’s air. In a furious, steady, almost mesmeric motion, Rawne began to pump his right arm in and out, smashing the iron-masked face of the pinned man off the bars over and over again. It was like the action of an industrial stamping press. Rawne didn’t have the time, space, opportunity or means for a single clean killing blow, so he compensated with frenetic quantity.
By the eighth blow, the sirdar had begun to struggle with real fury, and the carbine fired again. By the tenth, his teeth were broken, and there was blood spattering out of his shuttling head. By the twelfth, there was blood and nicks on the bars. By the fifteenth, the grotesk had cracked, and the sirdar’s head had become a limp, lolling punch bag, snapping to and fro.
Kaylb Sirdar finally tore free, somewhere around the seventeenth blow. He staggered backwards, drunken and swaying, howled a curse to the Kings of the Warp, and shot Rawne.
Except he was no longer holding his carbine. Rawne still had it in his hand.
Rawne swept the weapon in between the bars, rotated it end-over like a piece of show-off parade ground drill, aimed, and fired out of the cage without hesitation.
The las-bolt hit Kaylb Sirdar in the forehead, and hammered him back into the bay wall. The grotesk split in half, and the two pieces flew off his face and bounced away across the deck in opposite directions.
The sirdar slid down the wall, and finished up, dead, in a sitting position, his head tilted to one side. He had left a long streak of blood down the wall above him. If he had been alive to see it, Kaylb Sirdar would have recognised that the prognostications of the blood mark were not good.
Rawne lowered the carbine.
‘Holy shit,’ breathed Meryn.
‘Wh-where did you learn to talk that language?’ Cant whispered.
‘Yeah, Cant, this is really the time for that conversation,’ said Banda.
Rawne poked the snout of the carbine into the cage lock and pulled the trigger twice, enough to blow the mechanism. He swung his cage door open and headed for the exit.
‘Hey. Hey!’ Meryn yelled. ‘Where the feth are you going? What about us?’
‘He’s going to check we’re secure, and then he’s going to get the keys,’ said Varl calmly. ‘Feth, Meryn, what are you, a child?’
Rawne reached the bay hatch and peered out, the carbine ready. There was a lot of shooting going on outside, quite close by. The smell of burning was intense. He could see smoke in the air now. He could hear screams. In the neighbouring cell bays, prisoners were being slaughtered.
He pushed the hatch to, and opened the wall box where the detention officers kept the cage keys. They jingled as he shook them out in his hand and hurried back to the cage row.
‘Unlock and get out, fast,’ he said passing the keys to Varl, the first in line. ‘We’re getting out of here.’
‘But what about–’ Daur began.
‘If we stay here, we die,’ Rawne said, cutting Daur off. ‘We get out, and find out what the feth’s going on. Then we worry about the consequences.’
Prisoner B turned his head to look at Gaunt as he entered the sick green light of the tank cell. He looked at the bolt pistol in Gaunt’s hand without a blink or the sign of an expression.
Then he turned his head again and sat looking straight ahead.
‘There’s no time for a conversation,’ Gaunt said.
‘I know,’ said the etogaur.
‘We have an understanding?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Just do it,’ the prisoner replied.