Best Served Cold - Secrets of the Black Library (2nd Annual Fiction Competition)

“I’m telling you, sarge, something ain’t right!”

Sergeant Raak had had just about enough of Corporal Phaestus.  Since Raak had been assigned to Tempest Squad, a recon unit in the 814th Cadian Infantry, he’d seen action on a dozen worlds.  He’d wanted to pull the trigger on Phaestus since the third one.  Loud, boisterous and a crack shot, Phaestus was the sort of normally-fearless idiot who’d endanger the whole squad by filling their heads with exaggerated tales of heroism.  Raak had no time for martial pride: wars were won with good intel and dirty fighting, not moronic bravery.  Tonight, tracking a sensor blip into a ruined hab-zone following a lightning raid on a forward command post, he was in no mood for insubordination.

“Soldiers die in war zones, Corporal.  You’ve seen worse.  Shut up and fall in!” hissed Raak.

Phaestus must really have been rattled, thought Raak, because even the rawest recruit would have shied from the viciousness in his tone.  “Sarge, who hits a command post but doesn’t steal the decrypt equipment?  Who leaves blood, but no bodies?”

“Someone who’s not interested in your crap, Corporal!  You know the mission – track, report, engage if necessary.  For the last time, shut up!”

---

Just ahead, a flickering light could be seen amid the ruins of one of the hab-domes.  The nearest wall was mostly intact, other than the area surrounding the main double-door, which had been blasted or torn off its hinges.  Raak gave the hand-signal to Tempest Squad’s point men.  Moving up to the shattered entrance, Raak could hear faint voices and what sounded like an injured soldier’s moaning.  He sent the countdown signal to the rest of the squad.

Moving with one purpose, Tempest Squad swept into the ruined dome, weapons ready.  A slender, hideously twisted creature with a monstrous grin, flanked by two monstrous brutes and waving nightmarish surgical tools, hovered purposefully over a bloodied slab.  The ghoulish scene was cast in an obscene half-light by three floating globes above the slab, on which a hideously-mutilated communications officer twitched feebly.

Taking in the scene in an instant, Raak and his men unleashed a storm of las- and plasma fire.  The flanking monsters fell, but some blasphemous shield preserved their leader.  It looked amused rather than worried as the volley ended.

“Ah, good of you to join us.  I’d promised my friends a thousand screams.  Your colleagues barely provided six hundred, and we were getting tired of waiting.”  

Raak shivered, and realised that the cause wasn’t just the macabre scene before him.  A thin sheen of ice covered the ground and the remaining walls of the hab-dome.  Raak pulled back, grabbing his long-range communicator from his belt.  Impossibly, the activation press-stud had frozen solid.

The haemonculus smiled evilly, and inky blackness surrounded Raak as the globes flickered and died.

“You should feel honoured, mon-keigh!  Pride of place at the Mandrakes’ feast!”

Claws and blades took form in the freezing darkness, and Tempest Squad was lost to the night.