sergeant’s micro-bead in his left ear.
“The crawler was hit from the north-east,” said Folches. “Move out, dispersal formation.”
“How can we engage what we can’t damn well see?” asked another of his team, his voice
strained. Fear, Folches realised. He rounded on the man, and grabbed him by the shoulder, pulling
him close.
“You done?” barked Folches into the man’s face, and the soldier nodded curtly. With a shove,
Folches pushed him away, and gestured for two of his men to move around the front of the crawler,
and for the other two to proceed around its rear.
His men nodded their responses, and the sergeant began moving towards the rear of the hulking
behemoth, loping along the length of the crawler with his body low and the butt of his laslock
pressed into his shoulder. Behind him, the two soldiers loped through the snow and ice. The other
two men, moving in the opposite direction, disappeared instantly into the storm.
Reaching the rear of the ice-crawler, Folches gestured for his men to halt, and risked a glance
around the back of the immense vehicle. Smoke was billowing from the engine stacks, and hot oil
was spilling out onto the ice. Steam rose from where the oil was pooling.
Crouched low, he signalled for his men to take cover.
One of the soldiers, Leon, dropped to his stomach and began crawling elbow over elbow through
one of the deep depressions created by the crawler’s track units, easing himself into position and
sighting his long-barrelled lasgun out towards the north-east. The other ducked beneath the
undercarriage of the crawler, and squirmed forward to take up a position looking out to the northeast.
Folches leant around the corner of the crawler, peering through the sight of his weapon. The
scope rendered the landscape in shades of green, and though it lit up the darkness as if it were day,
the fury of the storm was such that he could see no more than twenty metres ahead.
There was nothing to see, just a swirling blanket of snow and ice.
“Julius, you seeing anything out there?” he said into his micro-bead.
“Negative, sir,” came the response.
“Hold position,” he said.
The wind howled around Folches, and he remained motionless, waiting. Minutes dragged by,
and the biting cold began to seep through his limbs.
He lifted his head away from his gun sight, and stared out into the blanketing white gale. A
shadow of movement ghosted behind the veil of swirling ice.
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He dropped his eye to his sight once more, straining to pick up the movement. He saw nothing,
and swore under his breath.
“You see that, Leon?” he hissed into his micro-bead.
“Didn’t see anything, sir,” said the soldier.
“Damn it. There’s something out there. Julius, anything?”
There was no response from the other soldiers of his squad, just the relentless roaring of the
wind.
“Julius, Marcab, come in,” said Folches, but again just silence answered him.
“Hell,” he swore.
The sergeant felt movement behind him, and he swung around, his heart thumping, bringing his
laslock to bear on… nothing.
He was jumping at shadows, and he cursed himself. He forced his racing heart to slow, breathing
in slowly.
“Calm yourself, man,” he said to himself as he resumed his position. He’d give anything for a
blast of his stim-inhaler around about now, but he had left the black market narcotics back onboard
the crawler.
Trying to push the cravings away, Folches took a deep breath, and tried to contact his other
soldiers once more.
“Marcab. Julius. Come in,” he whispered hoarsely into his vox-bead. “Where the hell are you?”
Again, nothing but silence.
He flashed a glance towards Leon, lying concealed in the crawler tracks. The motionless soldier
was face down, and blood was splattered out around his shattered head.
Folches pulled back from the corner of the crawler, and a flurry of projectiles impacted with the
metal, centimetres from his face.
Several of the rounds sliced past the corner of the crawler, whistling sharply as they sped
through the air.
A strangled grunt carried to Folches’s ear on the wind, and he knew that the last of his squad,
Remus, was dead.
Swearing, Folches leant out around the corner of the crawler, presenting the smallest target
possible.
Half a dozen figures in glossy black armour were darting through the snow, and he saw larger,
shadowy shapes gliding forwards behind them, several metres off the ground.
The sergeant snapped off a quick shot towards the closest of the figures, and ducked back into
cover as return fire spat towards him. One of the enemy rounds struck him, slicing a neat cut
through his body armour and scoring a wound across his forearm.
The cut was impossibly thin, and at first there was no pain, but then blood began to well and he
cried out, clutching a hand to the deep wound.
Leaving a trail of blood drips that hissed and steamed as they struck the snow, the Skyllan
Interdiction sergeant staggered away, dragging his laslock with him. He slipped in the hot oil
pooling from the damaged engine block, and fell to his knees. Scrabbling through the sinking mire,
Folches pushed himself back to his feet, and ran blindly around the corner of the immense icecrawler,
looking fearfully over his shoulder.
A thin, wickedly barbed blade entered his guts, sliding easily through his armour and flesh and
halting him in his footsteps. His laslock dropped from his hands, and he stared up into the face of his
killer. Nothing could be seen behind the cruelly slanted eyes of the blank helmet, and all Folches
saw was his own face reflected back at him.
The figure was a good head taller than him, though it was inhumanly thin, and it cocked its head
to the side, leaning into him as it twisted the blade embedded in his stomach, as if savouring every
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moment of the kill. Blood gushed from the wound as it opened up, and steam rose from the heat of
his innards.
A hand, fingers like the black legs of a spider, clamped around Folches’s neck, and he was
pushed up against the crawler. The blade slid from his gut and was held poised in front of the
sergeant’s eyes, blood dripping from its elegantly curving tip.
The figure pressed almost intimately close to the dying sergeant, as if it wanted to experience
every last dying sensation of the soldier. Then it pushed the blade into Folches’s side, sliding it
slowly up between his ribs to pierce the lungs.
Blood foamed up in the soldier’s mouth as his lungs began to fill, and he gasped for breath as he
slowly drowned on his own blood. The black fingers remained clasped around his neck almost
lovingly until his heartbeat fluttered and stopped.
Then the black figure released its grip, and the sergeant slid to the ground.
Solon ran towards the control cabin of the ice-crawler, barging workers out of his way. The sirens in
the claustrophobically narrow hallways were deafening, and he winced and clamped his hands over
his ears as he ran past one of the blaring klaxons.
A burly orderly, his overalls covered in oil, ran into Solon as he rounded a corner, knocking him
back into the wall.
“Sorry, boss,” said the man, helping him back to his feet, and Solon pushed past him.
He vaulted a steel banister, landed on the gantry below and ran on, turning to the right towards
the control cabin. His boots rang out sharply as he climbed a short flight of stairs, and slammed the
door to the control cabin open.
“What in the hell—” he began, but his words of reproach to the relief driver died in his throat.
A fist-sized hole had burned through the side window of the cabin and driven through the drivemechanics
on the wall opposite, leaving a smoking hole that dripped with molten metal. The driver
was slumped back in his seat, half his head missing, the devastating blast having clearly passed
through him when it had struck.
Solon gagged at the stink of burnt flesh, but moved into the cabin, trying not to look at the
corpse, and failing. There was no blood. Whatever had struck him had cauterised the wound
completely, forming a blackened crust. The blast had hit him in the temple, and everything in front
of the line drawn between his ears was missing, down to his mouth, which was drawn in an almost
comical expression of shock.
Tearing his gaze away from the corpse, Solon moved to the control console. It was dead, no
lights flickering along the length of its panel at all, and he swore. He flicked a few switches,
muttering an entreaty to the Omnissiah, but nothing happened. He balled his hand into a fist and
stuck the console.
“Come on, damn you,” he swore.
Red warning lights flickered, the needles of the dials wavering back and forth, and Solon let out
a surprised laugh of success.
His small victory was short-lived. A beam of solid darkness punched through the side of the
control cabin, destroying the console in a shower of sparks. Cables and wires were fused by the
lance strike and flames exploded outwards with immense force, shattering the already ruptured
plasglass windows of the cabin and hurling Solon backwards through the cabin door.
Thrown backwards down the stairs leading to the cabin, the flesh of his face and arms blistering
from the heat, Solon hit the deck hard. Frantically, he fought to rip his thermal undershirt off, for the
synthetic material was melting onto his skin. Shaking the smoking, skintight shirt loose, he hurled it
away from him, and began to stagger back.
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The crawler, the closest thing he had to a home since he had been expelled from Sholto guild
eighteen years ago, was beyond redemption. It was dead, and the vultures were circling outside to
descend on its carcass.
He had to get away.
Rounding a corner, he almost ran headlong into Cholos, with the frightened boy Dios in tow.
“Solon,” began his second, his face panicked.
“Not that way,” he shouted, turning the man around and pushing him before him. “The crawler’s
done. We have to get the hell out of here.”
Screams and shouts echoed up through the corridors, and Solon and Cholos fought their way
through panicked workers. The crew looked to Solon for guidance.
“Get your exposure suits on,” the overseer bellowed. “We stay here and we are all dead.”
Or as good as, he thought, thinking of the distinct lack of bodies aboard the crippled crawler
they had come across just hours earlier.
“Damn,” swore Cholos. “My suit.”
“Where is it?” asked Solon.
“In my locker,” answered his second. “But Solon, the refugees… there are not enough suits for
them all. We can’t leave them.”
“We stay here and we die.”
“But all those people?”
Solon swore and punched the wall, bruising his knuckles.
“What do you want me to do, Cholos? I can’t save them, and with the generators down, they’re
going to freeze to death as surely in the cargo bays as out on the ice.”
“There must be something we can do,” said Cholos.
“Well, if you come up with something, I’m all ears. Maybe that bastard Folches can call in
support from the Skyllan Interdiction, or something. I don’t know.”
Cholos let out a long breath, and rubbed a hand across his face.
“Take Dios, Solon,” he said. “I’ll meet you down below. I’ll be quick.”
Solon looked down at the boy, who was staring up at him with wide eyes, and swore. Cholos
dropped to his knees.
“Go with Solon,” he said slowly to the boy. “He’ll see you safe. You understand?” Dios nodded
solemnly.
“That’s the way,” said Cholos, ruffling the boy’s short-cropped hair as he stood once more. “I
won’t be long.”
“I’ll meet you on deck three,” said Solon.
“I’ll be there, boss,” replied Cholos, giving Solon a tense smile.
“You’d better be,” said Solon, and slapped his second heavily on the shoulder, urging him to
move. “Go.”
Cholos ducked through a side hatch, and Solon glanced down at Dios once more.
“Come on, boy. Move,” he said, gruffly.
The boy gave him a salute, his face serious, and the two of them set off towards the cargo bays.
It took them the better part of five minutes to move from the crew area to the cargo holds, passing
through twisting corridors and past dozens of panicked crewmen.
Punching the locking plate of cargo bay three, the door hissed open and swirling wind struck
him. Screams were lost in the gale roaring through the cargo hold, and Solon saw that one of the
cargo bay hold doors was wide open.
Through the blinding snow and ice, Solon saw a dark shape hanging in the air outside, hovering
four metres above the ground. It was sleek and black, with wicked blades and spikes protruding
along its sides, and it rocked slightly as the winds buffeted it, like a ship rolling on the open sea.
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Black figures, taller and slimmer than a man were dragging people kicking and screaming
towards the skiff hanging in the air outside. As he stood frozen on the spot, transfixed by the horror
of what he was seeing, a struggling woman was knocked to the ground by a backhanded slap, and
hauled towards the gaping cargo bay door by her hair.
A score of people were already trussed up on the mid-deck of the skiff, lying in a moaning pile,
their hands bound behind their backs.
One of the black figures turned its faceless helmet towards Solon, and he felt a fear that he had
never before experienced as the reflective eye lenses bore into him.
The figure barked a word in a language that Solon could not understand, spun on its heels like a
dancer and swung something up from its side. With a flick of its arm it hurled the object towards
him, spinning it end over end.
Even as the dark figure cast its weapon, Solon was backing away, and he tripped over the boy,
Dios, who was clinging to one of his legs. Solon fell, swearing, and the spinning weapon scythed
above him to strike one of his crewmen who had come up behind him.
The man fell, gagging, his hands clutching at the weighted wires wrapped around his neck. A
flicker of energy coursed along those constricting wires and the man fell, convulsing violently, to
the ground.
Scooping the boy up in his arms, Solon punched the door panel, bringing the hatch slamming
back down, and turned and ran, leaping over the twitching figure on the ground.
The other cargo bays were to the left, the engines to the right, and Solon paused for a second, not
knowing where to go. The boy wrapped his arms around Solon’s neck, burying his face against his
