It was to be a most unpleasant stay.
Regara looked at the Munitorum officer’s proffered hand with something approaching disgust.
‘Welcome to Sagorrah Depot,’ said the officer, fighting to be heard above the slowly cooling engines.
Despite himself, Regara shook the odious man’s hand. He learned his name was Ossika, a stoop-backed, sun-burnt wretch of a creature. Ossika had the look of a man who’d spent too long inside a Departmento-appointed office-hub, logging and charting, turning the slow logistical wheels that fed the great war engine of the Crusade. Idly, the major wondered who Ossika had annoyed to be ‘rewarded’ with this duty.
Introductions were made crisply and efficiently from both parties. They were walking from the landing strip when Ossika spoke next.
‘Quite a few birds you’ve got in tow,’ he said, wiping a dirty kerchief across the strands of hair threading his bald patch.
Culcis sneered but kept the gesture hidden beneath the brow of his officer’s cap. It was a gesture of ostentation and strength, making it clear to all and sundry that the Volpone were at the summit of the hierarchical chain.
Behind the lieutenant strode the rest of the cadre: Speers and Drado, both corporals, both aides to Regara and Culcis respectively. Sergeant Vengo followed. He’d been quiet since embarkation. A head wound sustained in a recent combat action meant he’d only just returned to service from the medicae. After him were the seven remaining Volpone troopers from Regara’s command squad. The other eight company captains and their associated officer cohorts would join them later. Operatives from Ossika’s staff were already liaising with them in a holding station just outside the landing zone to assign billets.
‘Almost stretched our landing field to capacity,’ Ossika concluded – Regara did not deign to respond – leading them towards a Salamander-class command vehicle. There was only room enough for Ossika, the two Volpone officers and their aides.
Culcis nodded to Vengo as he climbed aboard, to which the grim-faced sergeant nodded back and then turned on the rest of the troopers.
‘March formation, crisp and straight!’ he bellowed. ‘Show this rabble the quality of the Volpone 50th!’
The Salamander was already rumbling away, its engines stuttering with the repellent sand that seemed to clog up everything – Culcis brushed at the rust-coloured rime it left on his buttons and lapels, the raised plates of his carapace armour – before Vengo had the men assembled. They’d rejoin the rest of the battalion and prepare the major’s command station for his return.
As the command vehicle picked up speed, the camp grew slowly around them. Lieutenant Culcis found his eye drawn to the various regiments, cooling their heels and awaiting reassignment to the Crusade frontline.
No soldier liked being away from battle. After a while, fighting and survival became ingrained behaviour. Anything else was anathema, a foreign way of existing. Most couldn’t take the silence of ordinary life. It ground at the nerves and made men who were sane and balanced in a trench war react insanely and violently when at peace – judging by the sheer levels of disorder and discontent apparent on Sagorrah, that fact was evidently true.
Culcis recognised some regiments. Vitrians, Roane Deepers, Castellian Rangers – he’d fought alongside them all at one point or another. On the field of battle, they’d spilled blood together; out here in the desert, they reacted with hard stares and aggressive postures. Sagorrah was a powder keg, Culcis realised. All it needed was someone to light the fuse.
‘This place is a wretched dump,’ said Speers. The aide was a wiry-looking man, but tall and brawny like most of the Volpone. You couldn’t tell by looking, but his head was completely shaved under his grey bowl helmet.
‘The phrase is shit-hole,’ offered Drado. The pug-faced corporal smacked his lips and scowled. ‘You can even taste it on the air.’
Culcis had to agree with him. As well as the reddish patina slowly crusting his uniform, there was a disagreeable tang on the breeze. Like metal.
Major Regara didn’t comment. He’d taken a position at the front of the vehicle, hands braced across the flatbed’s holding rail as he glared imperiously at the other officers in the camp. But Culcis knew he echoed Speer’s and Drado’s displeasure.
‘We’ll need to make the best of it,’ the lieutenant said. He noticed fetishes and other icons hanging from the guide poles of several tents. Since the Saint had emerged on Herodor and with her victories elsewhere on the Sabbat Worlds, there’d been an upsurge in religious affectation amongst some quarters of the Guard.
Culcis needed no gewgaws or false reliquaries. He touched the indigo aquila that fastened together the armaplas of his collar – that was all the symbol he needed.
‘No, lieutenant,’ said Major Regara from the front of the command car. ‘I have no intention of us staying long enough to warrant such a concession.’
If Ossika, standing to the major’s left at the front of the car, thought anything about that he kept it to himself.
The Salamander had started to gain a steep rise. As it crested the hill, a large bastion-like structure loomed. Its grey-black walls, buttressed flanks and soaring watchtower screamed operational command station. It was the seat of Ossika’s power. Beyond it, the horizon line hinted at hills and other structures. Only their vague outlines were visible, the rest was lost to the distant heat haze.
A line of troopers was filing towards them as the Salamander began to slow. They were a ragged group with tattered uniforms, sleeves and fatigues cut back with knives to expose tanned, muscled limbs to the sun. They carried tribal tattoos on their slab-like faces, jagged and harsh like painted blades on skin. They also wore their hair long, bound up in topknots and ponytails. Several wore feathers or spikes of bone in their ears, noses and hair. They’d been issued with lasguns, but carried spears and blades in abundance. Culcis counted at least four snipers. It looked like they’d been hunting.
The lieutenant knew enough to recognise a feral regiment when he saw one. Such men were barely human. They had more in common with beasts. Truly, this was a pit of filth the Volpone found themselves in.
‘Hail, brothers,’ said their leader, his guttural accent so thick as to make the words near incomprehensible, as the ragged troopers went by in column.
Regara studiously ignored them.
Culcis conceded a nod as they drove past them. Alongside their officer was a trooper holding a scrap of cloth that might once have been a banner. It was wrecked, riddled with bullet scars and burn damage. Inwardly, the lieutenant despaired at such a lack in decorum and self-respect.
The gate to the bastion shadowed the Volpone as they approached it, smothering Culcis’s thoughts. As it ground open on slow, noisy hinges, Regara looked over his shoulder. The ragged regiment, some thirty or so men, had already disappeared behind them.
‘Dogs in the sun, lieutenant. Dogs in the sun.’
Culcis kept his eyes on the gate, grateful when they could finally drive inside to the cool, recycled air of the bastion.
Regara glared through a viewport in the bastion’s upper tier at the grounds below.
‘A heavy presence of guns,’ he said, noting the frequency and concentration of armed patrols as they overlapped at the bastion’s fenced-off perimeter. ‘There are over a million Guardsmen stationed at this facility.’