Metal Reviews

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A huge shell landed out of sheer luck in the foxhole closest to him, evaporating the company’s two commissioned officers cowering inside. More death rained from the sky, shredding the unfortunate fools that did not make it to their shelters in time.

Weber was yet to reach his fifteenth standard Terran year, just like his friends out there with him. But they were dying like the greatest of men, in spite of the occasional high-pitched yelp of pain and the cries for their mothers. Not that it was audible anyway; the pummelling artillery barrage had shattered many eardrums already, and many men were biting the barrels of their lasguns in vain attempts to block out the pain.

If anything, Weber had expected the pain. He had grown accustomed to it on his rigorous training in the purgation camps on Krieg. But he had also expected a chance to glory, and a chance to redeem the collective guilt of his homeworld. Waiting in a hole in the cold turf of Marak-3B – a planet he didn’t know or care for – was hardly a fitting stage for his aspirations. They had already been cut off from the rest of their regiment shortly after the disastrous planetfall. And now that Hauptsturmführer Von Ganz and his colour sergeant Roppe were gone, hopes diminished further.
An abrupt hush fell over the line as the enemy decided twenty minutes had been long enough. The silence was pierced by the moans and cries of the dying, and their pleas for a medic, or for absolution. Their answer came in the arrogant, inexperienced voice of Rottenführer Vendel:
“Fix bayonets!”

As instilled through the endless drills, Weber unsheathed his gleaming Kaiserjugend blade and affixed it under the muzzle of his lasrifle. Next to him, trooper Ferland readied his flamer unit. Not for the first time, Weber was disgusted by his comrade’s hideous face. A stray lasround had pierced the special arms trooper’s fuel canister during one weapons training, and the superheated shot had caused a drizzle of burning promethium to spatter across the boy’s chest and face. It seemed as if his face had been covered in rose petals.

A sickly smell entered Weber’s nostrils as a jeering sound erupted far out in no man’s land. Oddly enough, the voices did not stop at the ear; their discomforting timbre lanced the body as the soul. They moaned the most profane chants, in warped syllables that were never meant to be uttered by human throats. The noise seemed pathetic and terrifying at once, and Weber involuntarily offered up a prayer to the Emperor of Mankind.

As the remainder of the sixty men of his company raised their helmeted heads from their shelters, Weber quickly counted the living. Less than thirty had survived the artillery strike, of which another half dozen were not going to reach nightfall. He lay his lasrifle steady on the soft soil, and peered through the sights of the trusty weapon. A wave of exasperation hit the Krieg soldiers as they saw the enemy up close for the first time. Slowly, clumsily picking their way through the rubble-strewn and pockmarked no man's land, a leaderless rabble of old men staggered towards them. Their toothless mouths uttered hollow battle cries, and their wasted limbs gripped a variety of makeshift weapons, from the odd autopistol to industrial equipment, metal piping and simple rocks. The absurdity almost made Weber smile, until the first stray shots kicked up handfuls of dust in the ground before him.

The line of the Krieg Jugendkorps erupted in scorching fire as the pitiful assault force crossed the last fifty yards of wasteland. Weber’s lasrifle joined in with the company’s two heavy bolter batteries, picking his shots carefully. Amazingly, the old haggards took a great deal of killing before they sprawled in the dust. Even through the torrent of horribly cauterised las wounds and the maiming blasts of mass reactive bolter shells they ambled on, ever chanting their bizarre rhymes. Weber watched in equal horror and fascination how one near-naked ancient cultist ignored his spilled entrails to kill a Krieg trooper with a stub gun round to the skull. At last, the wailing old men reached the outer foxholes, and they rapidly engulfed the young soldiers inside, clubbing and hacking them to death.

“Cover me” yelled Ferland with manic glee as he clambered out of the hole. He sprinted the few yards to the overrun foxholes, then bathed them one by one in searing death, whooping with joy. Weber dialed his lasrifle to full auto and fell in behind his comrade, downing two foes with controlled bursts and spearing another on his bayonet. Then, just in front of him, Ferland's head was mashed by a shock maul, and the fire of both his weapon and his soul was instantly snuffed out.
Incensed by instinct, Weber uttered a prayer to his immortal Emperor and then roared at the top of his lungs. Absent mindedly, he squeezed the trigger and emptied his weapon's power cell at everything before him.
A blunt object crashed into his back, and he sank to the ground. Quickly, he regained his senses and rolled to the side. A shotgun discharge bit deep into the ground beside his face, tearing at his cheek and shredding his left ear. Weber took his weapon by the stock, and slammed his bayonet straight through the old man's bandolier and into his sternum. With one last hollow moan the wretch collapsed, and the young Krieg soldier sighed with relief.

Then, with eerie precision, he noted the killing blow he had struck. His blade had pierced the man's bandolier, straight through a crude delay demo charge fastened to it. The analogue timer, activated by the force of the blow, reached nil. Wilhelm Weber cursed the Lord of Mankind for all eternity.

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The 26th Death Korps of Krieg was dispatched with all haste to the Marak system on the Northern Fringe of the galaxy in 779.M40 , when a major uprising under Apostate Lord Seleucellius threatened the entire sector. The decision was made by Oberstgruppenführer Von Weitl to strike at the heart of the incursion: the Ecclesiarchical world of Marak-3B from where Seleucellius operated.

Most dropships never reached the surface; their burning carcasses were evidence of the ample air power of the Lord of Entropy. Others, like the one bearing the Schwaben Jugendkorps under Hauptsturmführer Von Ganz, scattered off and lost all contact with other elements. They desperately dug themselves in to await any further actions from the fleet in orbit. Their legion of adversaries quickly localised them in the wastelands west of the capital city, and decided to test their looted Planetshaker artillery on them. When after the barrage had ceased the Lord Apostate was rather displeased at the effects, he ushered a few hundred of the eldest Ecclesiarch monks to the Jugendkorps' positions, to give to the Imperials some sport and to the toothless wretches a chance to die for their Lords of Chaos. The Krieg company, leaderless, frightened and badly mauled, fell under their weight of numbers, just like the other elements that had made planetfall were crushed. Von Weitl, safe in his sumptuous quarters in the Battlecruiser Emperor's Excellence, decided the operation a failure, and withdrew through the Immaterium to the shipyards of Antgo Primus.

Six thousand men and youths were bereft of their lives, their glory and their names. And the eternal gods laughed.

The twilight shone dully through the glass of the syringe, amplified by the clear liquid it held. Carefully, he tapped it to make sure that there were no air bubbles inside, and injected it slowly into his wrist. He watched as the vein seemed to shift, turning a lighter shade of purple for a moment before it sank back into the flesh and was lost from sight. It would take a moment for the drug to work, so he let his head fall back onto the tombstone he was sitting against and half shut his eyes, the graveyard seeming to get darker.

He looked upwards suddenly, searching for the sun before it set. The day had been a cloudy one, as was usual in that part of England, but there was a slight brightness still coming from behind an old oak, so he lay back comforted, like a child knowing that his mother was just outside the room. Idly, he rubbed the fresh mark on his wrist, easing the flesh over the tendon and back again, and then, hating himself but continuing anyway, slid his hand away, down his leg and towards the metal abomination that once had been a foot. As usual, he couldn’t quite reach, and he could feel his gut stretching as he strained.

Concentrating hard, he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him until it was almost too late. Even then sensing rather than hearing the intruder, he twisted around to see who was there. The drug suddenly sent a jolt of light through his vision, painfully bright, and he jerked, blinded. “Sorry,” he managed to say, painfully aware of how he must look, dressed as he was and sitting on a grave with a needle beside him. Hearing nothing, and with his vision still temporarily impaired, he rubbed at his eyes. Eyes gradually clearing, he looked again only to see that there was no one there. There was, however, a beautiful marble statue of an angel atop the grave of a child. He had noticed it on his way in, nearly turning from the path to look closer, but was too busy preparing his dose. Now however, he stood and stared, entranced by the simple beauty of the figure, arms stretched heavenwards with pure white wings flapping gently in the evening wind.

As he stared, the angel lowered its arms, and moved its head to look at him. He smiled in greeting, childishly pleased that the angel had awoken just for him. Stepping forwards, he held out his hand, and the angel abruptly changed colour, red bursting forth from its side and splattering the ground, the white leaking away to leave its beautiful face a sickly yellow. Horrified, he stared as a nightmarish face peered around the angel’s side and gave him a sick grin, splinters of chalk dropping from its mouth as it chewed. The angel fell soundlessly, and the rest of its murderer came into view.

He had been a fan of horror films before the drug had become his only pastime, and he recognised the living corpse for exactly what it was. Gasping, suddenly short on breath, he stumbled backwards and fell over the very tombstone that he had been leaning against before. Scrambling upwards, his hand grasped and found his hypodermic, the tip sticking painfully in his finger. He hurriedly pulled it out, and thrust it before him as a weapon, waiting.

The zombie did not appear. Listening hard, he heard nothing but his own heartbeat, amplified and sped up, booming in his ears. As he stared, the tombstone began to melt, stone dripping back on itself like wax, and holes appeared. It collapsed completely with a hiss, and there was nothing on the other side.

Reaching out towards the puddle of stone, his hand came into contact with an invisible cold, hard barrier. He pulled back, and turned, still brandishing the needle before him. The rest of the graveyard seemed as before, stones standing silent sentinel on the empty shells they marked. Looking up again, hunting for the sun, he saw that she had vanished, shutting the door and going downstairs, leaving him in the dark with nothing but nightmares for company. Looking down again, watching for the predator that had killed the statue, he noticed movement in the corner of his left eye and spun, his meal foot digging into the earth.

The zombie had clearly cloned itself somehow, for now there were two of them, near identical, shiny eyes watching his face with the studious disinterest of the people he worked with, lived with, slept with. They simply stood, looking at him but not moving or trying to speak at all, but there was a strange, intermittent hum coming from their general direction. Abruptly, the sky blossomed behind them into a kaleidoscope of colours, rainbows and fireworks sprouting from nowhere and mating before sinuously twisting and exploding into more colours. As he watched, the colours fell to earth, and splattered the ground behind the zombies, turning the damp green grass a multitude of dyes. Even the distant screams that slowly struggled their way into his head, banging on the eardrums and begging to be noticed as they were slowly strangled couldn’t turn his attention from the heavens falling, the colours swirling. As the man’s mind was slowly cooked by the overdose, and the zombies made politely concerned noises that became more and more agitated as he ignored them, the world kept turning, a globe silently twirling in the vastness of space.

He didn’t stop watching the colours, standing motionless facing a marble angel, and the zombies moved on, disturbed.

So are people supposed to vote now?

If they want. Something tells me we're the only ones who care in the slightest. Eh, call it a draw.