Transplants by Rob Young

Author:Rob Young
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2022-11-02T16:30:20+00:00

6

Darya took one great, ragged breath through her bruised larynx, coughing the dust and ash from her crushed lungs.

Everything hurt. That was the only thought on her mind as she pushed at the dead weight pressing down on her chest, hands slipping over its slick surface as she slid clear.

Her next breath was less painful, but no less desperate. She kicked her legs out from whatever had been pinning them down and scrambled free into still, open air.

Nothing moved but the dust motes and settling clouds of ash. She stood in the centre of a mound of broken and dismembered bodies, her hands, face and uniform caked in the congealing remnants of her enemies’ blood. In the cold light of a bare moon above, the red was so deep that it appeared almost black.

It took a few moments for her to master herself at the sight, picking her way clear to open ground and the crater blasted into the empty street. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious beneath the heretic’s remains, but one glance at the dull grey sky told her that it must have been several hours.

Mir.

There was nothing left of him. The only signs he had ever stepped on Cocleratum were the crater in which she stood and the piles of enemy dead. There was no trace of the Heretic Astartes either, and Darya prayed that he too had been all but vaporised by the blast.

Numbly, she knelt down and touched the ground where Mir had died.

The heretics sheltered me from the blast, she realised. She clicked her fingers next to her ears to check that the dead silence was real and she hadn’t just been deafened. The sound was muffled through her right ear, but she heard nothing from her left – the side that had been closest to Mir when he detonated his charges. She patted herself down to check for other injuries but found little other than bruises and a deep gash on her cheek that extended from her lip to under her eye – painful, but nothing that would debilitate her.

She stood carefully, looking around for Ilya. There was no sign of him anywhere, just a long set of parallel tracks in the settling dust, showing that someone had been dragged away.

They’ve taken Ilya.

A sound nearby like cackling laughter had her running back to the cover of the shadows. She pressed herself up against the wall and groped for her knife, but it was gone, along with her rifle and the satchel of explosives. She cursed inwardly, casting about for anything that she could use as a weapon.

And there it was – Mir’s rifle lay atop the smoking corpse of a burnt and broken heretic, as if he were presenting it to Darya as a treasured offering. She stooped and picked up the weapon, quickly checking it for damage. It seemed to be in working order, other than the holes burned through Mir’s cloth wrappings – it even had at least ten shots left in the magazine.

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