NIGHTFALL PREVIEW VIII

Pick Up Your Weapon.

PICK UP YOUR WEAPON PT. 1

PETER NEALEN

“We are the Torremaddan 5th!” Flag Sergeant Eliphas’s voice boomed out over the parade field, easily heard despite the scrape of body armor and fatigues in the dirt and the scrape and rattle of weapons and equipment. “The oldest Torremaddan Phalanx still on its feet! Maybe the oldest fighting Imperial Phalanx in this whole cursed galaxy! And so help me, my boys, you will act like it!”

Angus Ulgar wasn’t trying to tune the Flag Sergeant’s words out, but the pain in his elbows and knees, not to mention the knowledge that he was going to have to patch the holes that were already letting grit and mud into his fatigues himself, once they all got back to the barracks, was taking center stage in his mind at the moment. That was why he suddenly lifted his head and found himself staring at a pair of boots that he hadn’t realized were there until he nearly ran into them.

“Trooper Second Class Ulgar!” Flag Sergeant Eliphas was looking down at him, hands on hips. “Can you name another Phalanx in this sector with five thousand years of unbroken lineage?”

Ulgar avoided looking the Flag Sergeant in the eye. Despite the fact that he and the rest of the men of the Phalanx—except for the officers—were now as filthy as if they were on a field problem, Flag Sergeant Eliphas’s uniform was somehow spotless and unwrinkled. Even his boots still shone. “No, Flag Sergeant.”

“No, indeed.” Eliphas crouched down close to Ulgar, his elbows on his knees. “You think I’m being too hard on you, don’t you Trooper Second Class Ulgar?”

“No, Flag Sergeant.” It was the safest answer.

“‘No, Flag Sergeant,’” Eliphas mocked him. “Yes you do. Of course you do. You weren’t the one with carbon scoring around the muzzle of his pulse rifle.” The flag sergeant had straightened, his voice booming out over the struggling troopers on a parade field increasingly turned to mud as thousands of men low crawled across it in their inspection-ready uniforms. “In fact, the one man who showed up to inspection with an unacceptable weapon is right there.” He pointed to the reviewing stand, where the General and his retinue were standing behind a tiny figure that could only be Trooper Third Class Cambrael, standing at attention, his dirty pulse rifle held at port arms, not quite silhouetted against the ruddy sky. “Why would I leave him out, if I wasn’t being too hard on you all, Trooper Second Class Ulgar?”

That was an answer he had ready, because he had learned it in basic training, not all that long ago. He still didn’t like it, and didn’t think it was nearly fair, but he wasn’t going to argue with Flag Sergeant Eliphas about it. He had no idea why the flag sergeant had singled him out to give this lesson, but if he didn’t recite the rote answer, then he was sure he was in for far worse than the whole regiment was getting at the moment.

“Because it is rarely the man who neglects his duties and responsibilities who pays the ultimate cost for his negligence, Flag Sergeant. It is the man to his right and left.”

“It is the man to his right and left.” Was that approval in Eliphas’s voice? “Do you hear that, my boys? I can hear some of you muttering under your breath, but do you think that I don’t know of what I speak?” He rapped his swagger stick against his leg, eliciting a metallic clack. “Trust me, my boys, when a wave of Charul battle thralls come streaming over the hill, none with an ounce of self-preservation left, there’s not going to be anyone but the men to your right and your left! The General and I push you because we’ve been there!” In addition to the raft of medals glinting on his chest, General Karko did have a bionic eye, though Ulgar had never heard how he had gotten it.

“Enough, Flag Sergeant.” As if responding to the invocation of his name, General Karko’s gravelly rasp echoed out over the parade ground. “We do have a timeline to meet. The shuttles will be on the ground in five hours.”

“You heard the general! On your feet, on your feet, on your feet!” Eliphas clapped his hands together with a single bombshell crack as the soldiers of the Torremaddan 5th scrambled to get up. “You lot have two hours to repair and clean your weapons, uniforms, and equipment! Back on this parade ground in one hundred twenty minutes, and not a second less! Move it!”

***

For some reason, crouched in a ditch on Rethrus Gamma, as beam fire flickered through the dust and smoke overhead, Ulgar found his mind going back to that day. He couldn’t say why. It felt like a lifetime ago, even though as far as he had experienced, it had only been days before. Cryonic suspension was absolutely necessary for hyperspace travel, at least for ordinary humans like those who served in the Eternal’s Imperial Phalanxes. Perhaps the Paladins could stay awake through hyperspace, but Ulgar had never seen a Paladin, so he wouldn’t know.

Maybe it was the dirt grinding into his skin under his fatigues. Maybe it was simply because trying to become one with the dirt of Rethrus Gamma drove home all the lessons that Flag Sergeant Eliphas had been harping on for the first year and a half of Ulgar’s service with the Torremaddan 5th. He really didn’t want to think about it, but his mind seemed to be reaching for anything besides the crackle of beam weaponry and the snap of those beams shattering rocks and fusing soil in the hillside behind them.

Beside him, Jerigan was almost in the fetal position, his pulse rifle next to him in the dirt, his chin tucked nearly to his chest, flinching with every report of a beam striking nearby. On the other side, Daskand squinted up at the top of the ditch, his pulse rifle clutched in his hands, only ducking when another hit showered them all with dirt.

Ulgar was facing the wrong way to see Trooper Corporal Aubrian coming, and there was simply too much noise to hear him until he was right on top of them.

“Get up!” Aubrian grabbed Jerigan by the webbing and hauled him up off the dirt, though not so far that his head rose above the top of the ditch. “Get up and shoot back! Lying here just lets them get closer! Do you want us all to die?” He threw Jerigan back into the dirt, picked up his pulse rifle, and shoved it into his hands. “Pick up your weapon, Trooper!”

Ulgar started to heave himself up toward the lip of the ditch, before Aubrian could reach him. Somehow, it seemed better to face the enemy than to let the corporal manhandle him. Leading with his pulse rifle, as he’d been trained, he lifted his head above the top of the berm.

He wished he hadn’t. Even with only the top of his helmet and his eyes above the dirt, he could see the wave of vaguely reptilian aliens, rushing forward on their strange legs with the knees bent the wrong way, firing wildly from the hip as they came. They were nearly shoulder to shoulder, and now less than three hundred yards from the thin Torremaddan line. Some pulse rifle and heavy beam fire was coming from off to his left, but so far, the sheer volume of energy the lizards were putting out was driving most of the Imperials to cover.

He fired, realizing that Aubrian was right. If they didn’t start to fight, they would be swamped under these fanatical monsters in minutes.

Holding down the trigger, keeping his hand over the top of the pulse rifle’s forearm as he’d been taught, he fought to tame the recoil of the weapon’s screaming rate of fire, playing the sights back and forth across the oncoming horde. His shots carved through the first rank of aliens, in some cases cutting through their thin bodies to strike the xenos behind them. Still more, nearly heedless of what was going on around them in their haste to get to the Imperials, stumbled over the bodies, falling into more of the Imperial fire as Daskand rose up next to Ulgar and added his own pulse rifle fire.

There was no thought in their minds except how to serve their masters. Ulgar had no idea what these aliens had called themselves, once. Now they were simply thralls to the Charul. Even as he killed them in their dozens, he felt his skin crawl.

Especially because there were humans in that mob, not just the reptilian aliens.

“Come on, Jerigan!” Aubrian’s voice was nearly drowned out by the noise, but that was why noncoms got so much practice yelling at their troopers. “Fight or die!”

As he bellowed over the sound of his own pulse rifle, an alien beam transfixed him through the skull. His head exploded as his helmet cracked, showering the troopers around him with gore as he fell backwards into the ditch.

Jerigan stared at the body, blinking blood and boiled brains out of his eyes before he vomited.

But even as the horror of the trooper corporal’s death clenched icy fingers around his chest, Ulgar felt a calm come over him. He emptied the rest of his magazine into the oncoming horde, as he bellowed at Jerigan. “If you don’t want to be like him, get in the fight!

“Pick up your weapon, Trooper!”

To be continued…