[28]

216.738.M41

Sanok Township

Evening

I do not claim a miracle, but I prayed for rain, and it rained.

It started as we were huddled together behind a fallen tree, binding our feet with strips cut from our garments and scraps of the web still clinging to my leg. The day was warm even under the trees, but we were soaked from sweat and exhausted and hurt and already becoming cold. There was something that I thought was a round rock, but it moved and scurried across my foot. I jerked my foot back and it tumbled over onto its back, flapping its carapace and wiggling its legs until it righted itself and marched away. It was a black and brown beetle with a thick spiked horn on its head and another on its backside. Tara's face made an ecstatic O of sudden joy. I coveted that joy. An ugly part of me wanted to smash the bug.

"What kind is it?" I said.

"I have no idea," she said with wonder. The bug crawled under some leaves and out of sight.

"Maybe you can look it up when we get home," I said.

A strong wind began to blow, carrying cold and moisture. We shrank more closely together as we finished our foot-wraps. A nearby crack of thunder made us all flatten ourselves to the ground before we recognized what it was. Then the sound of rainfall, drops catching on the leaves but nothing reaching us on the ground. Then a torrent, sluicing down, soaking, gusting, washing, cold.

"We should find a road," Verity said.

"A road?"

"You were afraid of dogs. Rain will wash a road better than the forest floor. And we might find an autocar or somewhere with a land-vox."

"Their cars might find us," said Tara. Which had been my reaction. But…

"I think Verity is right. We'll risk a kilometer to break our trail and then leave the road if we don't find something we can use."

Finding a road took much longer than I thought. Our training included wilderness work, but except for the weeks in Denma we had never done it for real. We had a rough sense of direction from the shading of moss and lichen on the trees, but no idea which way we had run to get here, and no knowledge of the shape of the land. We stopped and ate all of our ration bars, and gathered rainwater and drank.

We trudged on, moving in file, spaced about four meters apart. One burst couldn't take us all—with the meandering path forced by the terrain, not even if the shooter was on our axis of advance.

The rain lessened after about an hour. I heard something, a squealing sound that at first I thought was more damage to my hearing from the gunfire and grenades. But Verity heard it too, and then Tara did. We moved towards it and heard better—clank and clatter, squeal and grind, the sound of a slow train on bad tracks, getting closer. We ran.

There was a railroad. Not the normal kind, broad as a house and carved in a great straight line, but the small kind that was laid by hand after the reconquest era and only partially maintained in the centuries since. They're still in use in Gaervalt's poorest and least industrialized regions.

There was a train, already passing us. About twenty cars, mostly carrying lumber. I thought we might get the attention of an operator and get it to stop, but there was no cabin in the engine car, just a sensor rig for its crude machine-spirit. It wasn't rolling much faster than we could sprint.

"Board it," I ordered. We ran, jumped, helped each other, saved each other from falling. There wasn't anything to use for shelter, but the lumber car we converged on was easy to climb. We lay down flat on top, pressing ourselves together between two great trunks still oozing sticky sap. We had warmth from each other's bodies, and cover and concealment from anyone below. It was late evening. The sky was darkening under low and heavy clouds.

The wound in my belly stopped bleeding again. I fell asleep.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

It was still light enough to see when a whistle blast and a long screech of brakes woke me. I think an hour had passed. Probably fifteen kilometers of track distance, however long that was on a map. The rain had stopped.

"Stay down," said Verity, pressing me back into the wood. "Don't move." She was up on her elbow beside me, peeking out over the top of a log.

She described a small village or a work-gang settlement, where the railroad forked into two. There were more train cars being connected to the rear of the train. And there were two women with guns and dogs sitting at the station, talking to each other and looking at the train.

I asked what kind of guns, how carried, and what kind of dogs. They were shotguns, or hunting rifles without scopes, resting in the women's laps. The dogs were large. One brown and black with a sharp face, the other gray with a round, sad face.

If it was just them, we could risk it. We could engage from behind the train while it was stopped. Order them to drop their weapons. Then find a land-vox. Get help. Go home.

And they could just be hunters, coming back or going out to try to feed their families. Or even fisherwomen or woods-workers. Why not go armed? In Velgrad, private weapons were rare except for criminals. Ownership was suppressed. But in the countryside, even far from the Ork threat, it was different. Memory of Eldar raids was still raw. It had only been a year and a half since people vanished day after day. Better to be armed and have a chance to fight back. Better by far to have a chance to die, if fighting failed.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on NovelPhoenix. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

But they could also be the sect. With voxes and body armor under their coats, and allies in the buildings nearby.

"Stay down," I echoed Verity after she finished describing what she saw. She took it as an order and lay down flat with Tara and me.

"We'll keep going," I said.

A few minutes passed. A thump shivered through the train as the new train cars made contact with the previously last car. There were thumps and thuds and muffled bangs. Then the train moved again, clanking and clattering over a track-change, and accelerated slowly away into the forest.

Night fell.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

We reached the next bit of civilization not long after full dark. The train didn't stop, but it slowed, and we adjusted our positions until we could peek over our log. There weren't many lights. The tracks themselves were dimly lit by old lamp-posts. There were only four buildings, clumped around a road that came close to the rail. A rail station, a long, low warehouse, an engine wayshrine, and a boxy two-story structure as large as all of them together. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and outside of the fence, seven Enforcer autocars had it lit up with headlights and spotlights.

It was about two hundred meters away when the front face came into view and I saw the sign. MANAKAL in red block letters across a cratered facade. The train had brought us back where we had started.

Verity looked crestfallen—then suddenly hopeful. "Of course," she said. "Of course! They heard the grenades!"

Or somebody had seen us and gone to the Enforcers. Or…

"Could the Enforcers be under sect control?" I asked.

Tara shook her head. "Too many. I think there would only be one Enforcer for the whole township. They must have come a long way."

I could make out ten or eleven people kneeling with their hands behind their backs by one of the cars. Two Enforcers with rifles or shotguns stood nearby.

The train was going just jogging speed, now, rolling along on a banked-up ridge that partly overlooked the town. Landing on bruised and cut feet would be painful, and we might trip and roll down the artificial hill, but I didn't think we would get hurt.

The sect might have forces in the other buildings, hiding from the Enforcers… but did it matter? We could walk right up to the Enforcer cordon—better, just send me, and leave Verity and Tara hidden with the weapons.

We could get a vox and verify our identity. In an hour we could be in an aircar. In three hours we could be home.

Tara and Verity agreed with my assessment. I gave the order to dismount. It was painful, stumbling, falling, awkward, but we did it without breaking anything or discharging a carbine. We got down off of the embankment into a muddy ditch.

We approached Manakal from behind the tech-wayshrine, letting it block the line of sight to our approach. Already, part of me regretted letting the train go away without us.

All of the wayshrine's lights were off except for the glow-runes signifying the machine-spirit's presence. We crept closer as though approaching an enemy fortification, not our allies and rescuers. Slow, quiet, carbines up, spaced out as much as the sight lines allowed. We couldn't see the vehicles themselves, except for one empty one across the street, parked on the weeds outside the Manakal fence.

We were about twenty meters from the wayshrine, maybe fifty meters from the nearest Enforcer vehicle, when the headlights and floodlights up ahead started to flicker. A second later, there was a burst of gunfire and a crescendo of screams. We flattened ourselves to the ground. The sound didn't continue. The lights stopped flickering. I motioned towards the wayshrine. We crawled to it and stood. I made myself breathe until my heart slowed. I caught Tara's eye and nodded at the far corner. She positioned herself to watch it. I motioned Verity towards the near corner of the shrine. I would be her support if she needed it, and otherwise I would cover back the way we had come.

Verity got a few meters of standoff and worked her way around the angle. After a tense few moments, she fell back a few degrees, keeping her gun trained on the corner.

"They're all dead," she said, her voice as quiet as she could make it. "All. Cuts. Not shots."

"Attackers?"

"None visible."

A sudden jolt of fear pulsed through me and I snapped my gun up to the angle of the wayshrine's roof, just a few meters away. My finger was already taking up slack on the trigger, but nothing was there.

We hadn't been seen or heard yet, because we weren't dead.

We held our position for an eternity that might have been about ten minutes. Not daring to give up our covered sectors. Not daring to make a sound. The lights didn't flicker. There were no shots or screams or wet cutting sounds, just the normal noises of night and the soft hum of the still-running autocars.

I hadn't heard anything, except for the screams and the gun. I hadn't seen anything. Not even the bodies, yet. There were other explanations for what had happened, ranging from the simple to the exotic to the grotesque. But I knew. With more certainty than I knew the sun would rise in the morning, I knew that it was the Eldar.