FORTY-EIGHT 
Hauptmann never remembered much of what happened when they strapped him to the frame.
For what might be hours or even days, he stared into the fathomless other, whilst Pact chirurgeons observed and scratched notations on their clipboards. After a while, they would always release him and bring him back to his cell. It had been this way for days. Impressions lingered, feelings more than images. It terrified him, the thought of it, even in the amorphous abstract. A sense of wrongness stole over him, a glimpse into an oblivion that no man should witness.
And he itched. A spot in the middle of his forehead, skin aflame with irritation. A puddle of brackish water had formed in his cell and as Hauptmann crawled over to it he found his reflection. Dark rings lapped his eyes; it made them sunken but as nothing compared to the hollows in his cheeks. A revenant stared back, as foreign to him as another man’s face in a mirror. Without warning a coughing fit sent him into spasm, the puddle rippling with dark red cloudbursts. He wiped his mouth, using the scraps of parchment in his pocket. He did it without thinking, his blood smear further blighting the already stained pages. Names stood out, men he had served with, comrades, friends.
Garrison, Roper, Lennox…
Chari. Velas.
God-Emperor, what he wouldn’t give to see them again.
‘I will die here…’ Even his voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, no more than a death rattle.
And in that terrible moment of revelation, he knew he had to escape.
A guard was coming. Hauptmann heard the heavy booted footsteps down the stone hall, his ears keener than they had been before, a side effect of what they had done to him or his closeness to death. It didn’t matter. It cut through the fog, a measure of his old sharpness returning.
‘If I am to die,’ he whispered, reaching for the thin pipe spewing dirty water into the room, ‘then I’ll die fighting.’ He crushed the pipe, finding the reserves of strength to tear a piece of it from the wall. The end was jagged, no larger than a pocket knife, and fitted snugly in his clenched fist. Hauptmann sank down, hunched over, arms folded into his body, head tucked against his chest.
The footsteps reached the door and the bolt slid loose. The door opened, the guards’ voices abruptly louder. A low chuckle from one, two men sharing a joke at their prisoner’s expense. A weak and beaten prisoner.
A savage kick sent white-hot knives through his ribs but Hauptmann didn’t move.
Spittle-laced invective spattered the back of his neck, the first guard losing patience. The Pacter leaned down, scarred hands grabbing for Hauptmann’s neck.
The sergeant-cavalier uncoiled, so suddenly and quickly that the first guard fell back. It took the Pacter a few seconds to realise his throat had been cut, hands reaching, fingers clawing at the blood spewing eagerly around the shaft of pipe still lodged in his neck. Carotid artery. His comrade balked then reached for the blade he should have drawn before they had opened the cell door.
Forgetting the first guard, gurgling and drowning in his own blood, Hauptmann sprang at the second. A savage punch dented the grotesk and the guard staggered, emitting a shriek as his nose broke under the impact. Hauptmann got his hand under the mask, pulled, tore it loose. A face attenuated to pain glared back, scarified and furious. The guard made to shout, to roar, but found a rolled-up dagger of parchment rammed down his throat, stuffed so hard he choked on it. Hauptmann smacked the heavy paper with the flat of his hand like it was a hammer punching nails. He did it three more times, holding the guard down as the man collapsed, eyes bulging, shuddering in panicked death throes.
After a few seconds, the struggles ceased. The man in his arms stared glassily at the ceiling, the one on the floor on his back surrounded by a growing blood pool. Hauptmann took the second guard’s blade, his only weapon, and made for the cell door.
Listening to the corridor outside he heard nothing, save for the wind whistling eerily through clefts in old stone. The red wash hadn’t changed, the lumens overhead encased behind coloured plastek.
Padding on bare feet, he edged into the corridor. It stretched away in two directions; left, he vaguely recalled, headed towards the chamber and the vaulted ceiling of fathomless glass shards. He went ahead, passing other cells, pausing to look through the view-slits but finding most of them empty. A man in a Militarum uniform, it was hard to tell the provenance but Hauptmann thought maybe Slokan, stared back at him.
‘What’s your name, soldier?’ he whispered hoarsely and paused halfway through retracting the bolt when the man replied.
‘Behold the eightfold dark… Behold the shadows of its coming… It is the end and the beginning… It is the hells of the unnamed…’
Drool oozed from the Slokan’s mouth, a tarry line of it, stretching down and out of sight. Slowly, Hauptmann slid the bolt back and the Slokan stepped away, fading into the shadows until only his eyes were visible.
‘The unnamed…’ he hissed, ‘the unburdened.’
Hauptmann made the sign of the aquila and moved on.
A second cell held only a body, the poor bastard face down in a pool of their own vomit. In a third he found a hunched figure rocking back and forth, mumbling incoherently. A stray shaft of light from a flickering lumen caught the figure just so and Hauptmann saw they had taken their own eyes. Gaping red-ringed hollows remained.
He moved on but found no allies.
At the end of the corridor, steps led down to a deeper part of the fortress. It was dark, the lumens less frequent in this lower region. Blinking back the sweat that had crept into his eyes and trying to calm his pounding heart, he descended the steps.
Not far from the bottom, he heard voices. The language was unfamiliar, a string of harsh consonants: Pact dialect. Hauptmann gripped the blade a little tighter. It was a crude thing, more cleaver than sword, heavy and serrated. Pressing his back against the warm stone, he crept around the wall, trying to catch a glimpse of whoever was below.
Two Pacters in rugged military garb stood arguing over a crate. It was a hefty metal box, machine-stamped and bolted shut. It looked heavy and had a little void scarring, the telltale frostbite of transit through deep space. He wondered what it contained. The two Pacters had been moving it. A servitor lay inert on the floor nearby, a bullet hole in its skull and no longer functional. Now the troopers had to struggle with the crate themselves and argued over how best to get it onto a tracked hauler with its rear ramp extended. A spiked helm had been discarded, so too a weapons belt and bandolier, their trappings left on a couple of metal drums. Hauptmann recognised the Departmento Munitorum stencilling on the rounded exteriors indicating ‘flammable’ and guessed the fuel was purloined from some Imperial depot.
In any event, the Pacters had become engrossed in their spat so didn’t see the Pardus sergeant-cavalier creeping up on them until it was too late.
Hauptmann shot one through the back of their piebald head, the pistol’s echoing report making him wince at its loudness. As the first trooper fell, Hauptmann gunned down the second, putting a hole in the man’s chest, but it didn’t stop him. Hauptmann knew from the briefings and his own experiences on the battlefield that Pact infantry had incredible tolerance for pain and a near-preternatural ability to shrug off wounds that would kill lesser soldiers.
The second trooper rounded the crate, drawing a knife from his belt. Shorter than Hauptmann’s stolen blade, it was nonetheless wielded with skill and looked wickedly sharp. The Pacter lunged, and he dodged back, heart thundering in his ears, blood pulsing. Hauptmann swung but failed to connect and the trooper tackled him, the pain sharp as his back collided with the ground, the Pacter grappling and stabbing. A cut opened up Hauptmann’s forearm as he raised it to defend himself. Hot, rancid breath washed over him through the grotesk as the Pacter struggled to get the upper hand.
Hauptmann twisted, managed to get the pistol between him and his opponent. Then he squeezed. One, twice. He emptied the clip until it went click and then kept going. He was still struggling several seconds after it was all over and his chest had been painted in Pact blood. Rolling the corpse off him proved hard but he managed it, the effort leaving him exhausted, breath hitching. He tossed the pistol but picked up the cleaver-sword from where he had dropped it, hooked the grenade bandolier across his shoulder.
Then for a few moments he just crouched in the half-dark, listening. No one came. Whatever the Pact were doing, he was beneath their notice.
Unsteady, Hauptmann staggered over to the crate and used it for support whilst he got his breath back. It had a cargo designation. The loc-ref meant nothing but he read the name stamped on the side in his head: Spica Maximal, Mergent Worlds.
He hadn’t heard of the place nor did he know where it was relative to Gnostes. Something about the crate though, a subtle vibration in the metal, possibly imagined but disturbing nonetheless, made him shrink back.
Hauptmann fled deeper into the shadows, rudderless and afraid but determined to find a way out. Even though he was dying, he wouldn’t die here. Not a prisoner. He would at least be free, like the wild equines of his homeland. He considered the grenades and the barrels of promethium he had passed along the way. Only two, but a storeroom might be nearby.
He scurried on, the desire to escape supplanted by a need for revenge.
The fortress was old and large but its roots were here in this undercroft. It reeked of decay, the stone old, the wood rotten. A sewer or priests’ tunnel might lead him out. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised when he found the temple.
A stout door stood between Hauptmann and the ritual place beyond. Through an old slit in the dark wood he saw the edge of a stone circle daubed with tarry sigils that he assumed must be blood. A coven of robed cultists knelt around it, several dead, their throats opened up to whatever gods they called master. In the middle of the circle knelt a man: a huge and muscular man with his back to Hauptmann, his skin inked in artful cuneiform. He was naked, though a suit of baroque and hulking armour arrayed neatly outside the circle could only be his.
The soft refrain of ritual chanting drifted through the slit, the words foreign to Hauptmann but also eerily familiar. It was this familiarity, the small voice in his head gently goading but growing steadily louder and more aggressive, that made him turn and run.
It was only then, stumbling through the dark, his fingers still tingling from touching the crate, that his head began to itch again.