Out of the badlands, huh? Nice. Now for the badderlands.
~~~
Journal of a Nameless Soldier
Invasion of Fjol, Day 1
Fjol, dark and violet. We made planetfall with the stationwreck on our trail, a horrible thing of hooks and chains and xeno blood. No sound outside of atmosphere, only the roar of the transport engines. Corporal Jamak passed the time by telling us the knife-ears feast on the pain of others, and will always grind their heel below the belt. I suspect it is from experience.
Groundpounders and cogboys came in the first wave, already set up by the time we disembark. Corporal Jamak reports our squad to the Governor, who assigns us to artillery. He looks me in the eyes and asks my name.
Trooper Lorkka, I say.
Trooper, he says, is this your first deployment?
No sir, I say, I'm already nineteen.
Nineteen, he says. I'd like to see where you go in five years.
In five years I'll be twenty-four sir, I say.
The Governor laughs like a crushed tire. Optimism, he says, must be appreciated, and he dismisses me.
~~~
Day 2
Moonless night. Raiders. In the dark they are nothing more than a shape of lights and edges, swift and sharp. Our torches cut through the darkness, long stripes of blinding light between stripes of blinded dark. Raised my rifle and fired blind, hit nothing. By the time we track them on the auspex they are gone. Wind carried blood and screams.
There is no softness to them. I have learned to sleep through the sound of death.
~~~
Day 3
Daylight, green and harsh. Crystals in the air, say the reports, xeno terraformers extracting airborne coppers. Smaller than a grain of dust, uncountable by the billions. If they would have killed us, we wouldn't be standing.
The ground is jagged sharp crystal. Every fracture creates a new edge to slice our skin. I long for the razorgrass plains.
The raids come constantly, and leave brutal casualties. When limbs are gone, the medicae attach prosthetics, but often there is not enough skin to keep the soldier alive. They die to infection, if they don't bleed out. One arm has gone through eight men already.
I shot an eldar last night. Lucky hit in the back of the leg, blood red. It screamed like a human as it went down, and its friends laughed and left. Two more shots to the spine, one through the head. The body kept twitching after I left it.
The eldar city looms in our horizon, over two hundred kilometres away. Its radar shadow warps our map, but naked vision is undistorted. It wears the shape of a compass needle pointed to the sky, with cables and bridges stretched like spiderweb. For a hive, it barely seems to fit a million people.
~~~
Day 4
They all sound human.
~~~
Day 5
Saw an eldar fire a black hole into our ranks. Sirro was pulled into a long wire of flesh and bone and died immediately, I hope. Put two shots through its head before the singularity exploded and wrapped my spine around the barrel of a Baneblade.
Medic says no permanent damage. Vertebrae like an accordion, he says. I don't know what those are. Pain travels up my spine like the teeth of a chainsword. I drink one to dull the blades, and one for Sirro.
~~~
Day 6
Fire in my veins, nerve compression. I am feverish with agony, my mind a clear pearl in a sea of madness. My body struggles to obey my strangled commands. I am a prisoner in my own skin. Minutes pass like millennia.
They must be hungry. Like dogs sniffing the blood of a wounded fox, the huff of its breath sweaty with bile. The eldar feast on the pain of others, and I am a banquet. I hear them in the ash winds; see their shadows dance across the red gravel. It hurts so much.
~~~
Wreavewind pulled the book from the jacket of the corpse. It hadn't screamed as much as the others, but that hadn't saved it from ambush.
Unsurprisingly, the mon-keigh scribbles were slightly more illegible than usual. The human's derelict education never ceased to amaze. How they hadn't devolved straight off the ladder of evolution, she'd never know.
There was a twinge of pain from her commweb, the archon demanding her recall. She smacked it, and cut out a portion of the pages, slipping a stillshard grenade in and tucking it back into the torso. See how the mon-keigh advance with time-frozen shrapnel in their primitive livers.
~~~
AN: It is no longer policy to recover bodies after a skirmish.
