The Mule bumbles along the track, the electric hum of its engine filling the compact cabin. Rhed watches the dense alien jungle pass. Rare streaks of yellow light reveal the dark inner workings of the dripping tangle. The underbrush extends well over the height of the Mule, with the fern-like structures at least three times the height of a man. Life is big here, with all that oxygen circulating in the sticky, humid air.
The marines bump shoulders as the Mule jostles. They stare at the scratched floor or their gloved hands, or their worn rifles, perhaps willing themselves away from this nightmarish place. They’ve lost more people to the planet’s native horrors than they have to the war they’re fighting. But more than that, they’re nervous of the person sitting at the other end of the Mule. As well they should be.
The Lasher has a smug aura around her. She knows she can pop the heads of all the people in the Mule’s cabin before anyone could so much as blink. Rhed doesn’t know her name. He never likes to get close to them. This one is on their side and she is a necessary evil. The enemy has their own Lashers and besides, she can warn them of perils no mechanical targeting system would ever see.
Which is why the force that rocks the Mule comes as a surprise.
The vehicle skids to a halt. The marines glance around, stunned by the suddenness of it. But there’s no screeching as the hull is rent open by shrapnel. No injection of molten metal into the cabin. No smell of smoke as fire explodes from the engine. Nothing.
Just the taste of copper in their mouths.
Rhed’s eyes go wide. He lurches against the door, breaking free of the Mule just as the visions strike.
Vile atrocities pulled from the deepest, darkest halls of his imagination marr his vision. Chaotic fractals in infinite patterns flash for nano-seconds between images of crimes no concious mind could conjure.
He stumbles across the muddy track, painfully aware of how exposed he is on foot in the jungle. But he needed to be clear of the vehicle. The others weren’t so quick to react.
Two marines have fallen through the door Rhed left open and are rolling around on the track, clutching their heads, their faces contorted in pain. The others in the cabin are likewise afflicted, and either sit paralysed in agony or lash out and throw themselves against the cabin walls, trying to bash the visions from their heads on alloy corners.
The driver falls out the front door and rolls in the mud, screaming. Rhed keeps backing away, half crawling, further from the source of their torment.
Terrorstrike Mine. No wonder the Lasher never felt it, it is coated in anti-psychic electrons, making it invisible to both her blindsight and the Mule’s optics. But not to the naked eye.
Rhed sees it, its activated core glowing a sickly green in a ditch by the road. He pulls his hybrid pistol from its holster and with a shaking hand, raises it.
The visions intensify. He can smell them now. Hear them. They’ve become apocalyptic. The marines will already be way past this, being so close to the Terrorstrike’s epicentre. Already they will be feeling the hallucinations as if they are there. Some of them will be experiencing time dilation. Days might have passed through their subconscious in mere seconds.
A few moments more and Rhed will succumb to the pull, unable to operate his body. He will be trapped in years of nightmares dredged up from the abyss of his own psyche - mangled limbs, tearing flesh, chemical burns, howling screams, burning eyes - as the time dilation accelerates exponentially.
By the time the evac team find him and the others, in a few hours if they are lucky, he will have experienced a millennia of horror and his overclocked brain will be fried from the strain. He’ll be a drooling mess on the muddy floor of this forsaken jungle and the kindest thing they can do for him is put a mag-accelerated bolt through his skull.
Which is sufficient motivation to fight through the agony and confusion, and line the pistol’s sights up onto the Terrorstrike Mine’s core. The recoil knocks his unbraced body over. If he has missed, there will be no second attempt, as he lies on his back, gazing up at the swaying canopy hundreds of metres overhead.
There is a distant pop as something reactive explodes.
The visions begin to subside. Echoes of their terror flash across their vision, but after a minute the worst of it is gone.
Rhed sits up, his head pounding. He reaches around for the pistol he has dropped. His work isn’t done yet.
One marine has crawled away from the Mule and Rhed helps him to his feet. He’s gotten off lightly compared to the others, who lie groaning in or around the Mule. Some have scratches over their wrists and eyes where they have tried to claw the visions out, whereas others have gashes on their heads where they have tried to bash the visions from their brains against the Mule’s hull. The driver has shot himself through the jaw and lies still in the road.
But they don’t concern Rhed, not now. He’s got bigger problems.
The Lasher, still strapped into her seat, froths at the mouth, spittle flying everywhere as her body violently convulces. Her eyes have rolled into the back of her head. The flesh around her throat begins to bubble and expand. Her fingers snap backwards against their joints as new growths push through. There is a sickening crack as her spine is wrenched forward and something pushes through the central column of nerves.
‘Run,’ mumbles Rhed to the marine behind him, and the marine does not hesitate to comply.
As far as anti-personnel weaponry goes, a Terrorstrike does what conventional explosions can do for a hundred times the cost and effort. But what makes it unique, is that it can turn the enemy’s best weapons against them.
The Lasher’s body explodes into a virulent growth that consumes the cabin and the screaming marines within it. The hull of the Mule is ripped open on one side by the force of the daemon pushing its way through the Lasher’s body into the material world.
The Lasher is like a lens, opening herself for a brief flash into the other side, and allowing the incalculable energies there to lash out for but a mere moment. But the Terrorstrike has opened the aperture in the Lasher’s brain long enough for something over there to sniff out the world here.
And now it screams in fury and delight.
Rhed stares up at the juddering biomass birthed out the side of the Mule. He reaches to his shoulder and pulls the Brightlance from its sheath, its blade flashing blue as superhot plasma fills the capillaries in the metal.
He exhales and compartmentalises the fear. Locks it away. It’s why they brought him, after all.
If you’re going to send a Lasher into war, you better have someone that can withstand her empathic power standing not far behind. Someone that can kill whatever comes through her when it all goes wrong. Someone that’s had the most human part of themselves cut out.
You better have a Null Knight.
Paddy Dobson
13th June 2022