Death World (Warhammer 40,000) by Steve Lyons

Author:Steve Lyons [Lyons, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Lorenzo couldn’t sleep.

This was highly unusual – at least when he was planetside, out in the jungle.

They had set up camp before the sun had gone down. They were resting in preparation for their passage by the ork encampment – a trial in which the night would be their ally. Lorenzo could feel the distant sun on his face, and its red glow penetrated his eyelids – but he was used to that. He was used to making the best of sleep whenever, wherever and for however long he could grab it. It wasn’t just the sunlight that kept him awake.

Nor was it just the death of a trooper he had hardly known, to whom he didn’t remember saying a word; a young man who could have become a good comrade, even a hero, had he lived to earn his name.

The monster – Lorenzo couldn’t think of it as Dougan – could sink into the ground, and rise from it as silently. Little wonder, then, it had proved so elusive so far. Little wonder Landon hadn’t seen it coming.

Lorenzo was feeling the same discomfort, the same restless itch, as he had on the carrier ship. That creeping realisation that the world around him didn’t bow to the edicts of nature, to the physical laws he had thought inviolable. The feeling that nothing made much sense any more.

‘It couldn’t have been Steel Toe,’ Woods had insisted, in the aftermath of the brief fight with the monster, manifestly ignoring the proof that had been there for all to see, in Greiss’s hand. ‘I don’t care what happened to him, what this planet did to him, he wouldn’t have… He wouldn’t have. Not Steel Toe.’

‘Sorry, Hotshot,’ Greiss had said gloomily, ‘we have to face facts. I’d recognise this hunk o’ metal anywhere. See under the dirt here? Scorch marks from where Steel Toe was bitten by that critter on Vortis. It shorted the circuits, sent a lethal shock across its own mandibles. Steel Toe couldn’t walk for a fortnight, till we got the leg fixed, but he saved our bacon that day.’

‘It wasn’t him,’ said Donovits firmly. ‘It may have been his body, but it wasn’t Steel Toe. He’s dead!’

Myers had rubbed his chin where the mud-encrusted monster had hit him. ‘Well, he was sure taking a long time to lie down.’

‘Brains is right,’ said Muldoon. ‘What we just fought wasn’t Steel Toe. It wasn’t alive. It was some kind of a zombie. I looked into its eyes – and I’m telling you, Steel Toe wasn’t in there.’

Greiss, as usual, had turned the topic to the future, to what they did next, not letting his troopers dwell on what they couldn’t explain. ‘Right, men,’ he had announced, ‘that means we have a problem.’

‘I can’t see that thing coming back, sergeant,’ said Myers, ‘not minus its leg.’

‘Not what I meant, Bullseye. There’s something on this planet can bring the dead back to life.’

‘Not exactly bring them back,’ Donovits had corrected him, ‘just reanimate them.

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