It had not even been a full hour since they lost contact with Ernst when Gourke started panicking and making orders again.

"We need to send another man."

"Excuse me?" Mad full well heard what the commissar said.

"We can't just be stuck in here, waiting for ME-GO knows what to come here and slit our throats!"

"I'm ain't sending anyone else." Mad folded his arms under his breast and did not say anything further.

"You have to, you're the squad leader! I order you!"

"Stick yer own head in there, ya scrawny legged jackanape. I'd like to see what happens."

"Wha, what impertinence! I'll have you shot alongside that other one!"

"I'd like to see that too, Commissar, but seeing that we're stuck underground and it's me and my boys with the guns, you're going to have a hard time with that plan."

Gourke was finally at a loss for words. Tanlon could see the commissar's hand twitch toward his sidearm, but that was not the only thing making moves. Every trooper in the room was looking at Gourke and Mad and every weapon was unslung. Nothing was pointed at him yet, but from the look in his eyes, it was obvious that the image of getting fragged was not too far from Gourke's imagination.

"Mad, is there any other way out?" Tanlon said.

"Eh, I mean, it'd be nice if'n that door opened on its own, but if ten men and a plasma caster can't make it budge, I don't know what else there is. Why? You got an idea in that thick noggin?"

Tanlon refrained from commenting on thick heads and replied, "Yeah, I do. I can make it through the vent shaft."

Gourke stepped up beside Tanlon and put a hand on his shoulder, "My boy, the Emperor would be proud of you if you could get us out of this hole!"

With a step back, Tanlon shrugged Gourke's hand off and looked over at Mad. "With your permission, of course, sir."

"You'd be a thrice darned fool to try crawling up there, Tan. I can't let you do it. I should be the one to go."

"No, if you go, then who would be the squad leader?"

"I reckon you or Snell."

"Please, will one of your stupid Imps just go up there?" Gourke's sigh broke Tanlon and Mad's argument.

"Maybe we ought to send you up there?" Mad glared at Gourke and the commissar shook his head.

"I don't think he'd fit," Tanlon replied.

"Heh," Mad nodded, "Got a point."

Before Gourke could obnoxiously blow up at them, Tanlon went on and said, "You wouldn't fit either. Your shoulders are too broad."

"Now ain't that an exaggeration. I'd fit on up there just fine."

"No, he's got a point, Mad," Snell spoke. "Though what he really means is that you're too fat."

"Eh, what is this, some kind of gang-up?"

"Welcome to the club, Imp," Gourke muttered.

"Mad, I'm going whether you like it or not." Tanlon put his thumbs and forefingers under his mask, making a fake smile with his hand. "Besides, I'm an expert at crawling through creepy, dark places."

"Yer an expert at being stupid is what you are," Mad sighed. "Fine then, boys, give him a lift."

The squad formed back underneath the open vent shaft, a place that all of them had been avoiding. Four troopers formed a square while the rest of the squad readied their weapons in case something came crawling out. Tanlon used the hands and shoulders of the Ones and got a hold of the lip of the vent shaft. Without even needing a boost from the men below him, Tanlon hauled himself up and into the shaft.

It was not as bad as he thought it would be. It was of course tight enough that Tanlon's arms brushed against the walls of the shaft and it would have been pitch black were it not for the small beam of light coming from a small flashlight attached to Tanlon's gasmask. Aside from a recent trail in the dust of the shaft, there was no sign of any monsters crawling around up there.

"Tanlon!" Mad's voice came from the vent opening. He was only a few feet away, but the way the space was angled made him sound so distant.

"Yeah?"

"Are you still alive?"

"What do you think?"

"I dunno, maybe one of those freak monsters stole your voice."

"Would one of those freak monsters know that you snore in your sleep?"

"Wise..." Mad's voice degenerated into grumbling Tanlon could barely hear. "Well, don't go and get yourself kilt!"

"I'll try, brother," Tanlon said that part to himself and started crawling through the ventilation shaft as fast as he could. So far he did not hear any trumpeting or screaming, but that did not mean he wanted to repeat Ernst's fate. He pushed himself past the clinging fear of getting stuck and unable to move and didn't stop until his flashlight went out. Tanlon was too tightly packed in the ventilation corridor to pull back his hand to manage the flashlight on his face, so he cursed cheap Imperial equipment and pushed on. Memories of those horrendous screams gave him all the motivation he needed to push on through the dark, that and the vision he had received on Paradise. Even in that cramped ventilation shaft, Tanlon could still see the light that had pulled him out of the darkness. He had often lain in bed, thinking of that vision, the significance of it, and who he had spoken to, but one thing he knew was that he surely would have died had he not taken hold of the hand given to him.

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Was it the girl who saved him or a power beyond that snatched him from the brink? An act of fate that led him to that moment or his decision to step up to the opportunity? What was beyond this veil of mortal life and waited for all the troopers who spilled their blood on alien sands? Did it really all just boil down to the dark and light? Who was to say what was good and evil anyway?

No. Tanlon knew that was a cheap question, for he had encountered evil firsthand. In the twisted faces of Yabanchi Screamers, in the oily words of a venomous bug under Hemlock Mountain, and even in the mirror when Tanlon stared at himself. A killer who took life as easily as he grabbed onto it with the same ferocious desire of the enemy.

"Would that men could just lay down their arms and live in peace," Tanlon mumbled an old poem he read in the academy. "And in contentment, neath God's skies, could woe end and striving cease."

Yet why did the Imperial Army go from world to world in conquest? Slaughtering countless foes and spending young men's lives like bullets hosed from a machine gun? The glint of hatred in Gourke's eyes was not lost on Tanlon whenever he or any of the other troopers tried talking to him. Did paunchy old men like Gourke decide where Tanlon would die or was it something other? At least, it is true, that even in the overwhelming darkness of inhuman foes and indifferent commanders, Tanlon still saw the measure of what was good in the world, through the love he and his brothers had for one another. Even alone, his light gone out and crawling in a valley of death, Mad, Snell, and Haylock were still with him whether they knew it or not.

And that girl.

Where thinking of his friends put a little warmth into his chest, the memory of that white-haired angel that had been the tool to yank him from death brought something different. It wasn't just lust, since every trooper had to take a monthly ration of medication that suppressed those feelings, but there was some fuzzy-headedness that the memory of the girl created. Tanlon still had no idea if she had just been a hallucination, one of those witches, or an actual angel, but any one of those options brought mixed feelings. Shame, horror, doubt, but the one that embarrassed him, even as he crawled through the vent shaft was the simple fact that he thought she was cute.

"Tanlon..."

"I'm still here, Mad!" Tanlon stopped and cocked an ear. That voice wasn't Mad's.

"Tanlon, sir, you shouldn't be here. Tanlon? Who are you? Grab him, break him, rip his spine. Hello, Tanlon. I see you. Tanlon, join us! Give me your flesh."

The cool metal of the ventilation shaft under Tanlon started to shake and voices filled the narrow corridor. A wind kicked up behind him along with a torrent of screaming voices and harsh whispers. Tanlon wanted to look back, to at least see his foes, but he was too constricted to even bend his knees all the way. The thing in the vents was coming. If he had been going fast before, Tanlon went even faster now. He didn't care how hard his elbows smashed into the walls or if he scraped his hands crawling in the dust, he had to get away from the swelling tide of evil he felt brewing behind him like an evil wind of omen.

"Tanlon! Almost there. Give up. Stop resisting. We won't hurt you. Rip his tongue, gouge his eyes. Tanlon, please help. Help us. Another one. Come back here."

The young trooper was so frantic that he hardly noticed when the ground under his hands became slick and a copper odor filtered into his mask. The voices were getting closer and Tanlon could only do one thing, follow Gourke's advice and go forward.

"You've come far, but this is the end." The wailing congealed into one voice, sonorous and quailing in a hundred tones. Tanlon felt something grab his ankle and tug him back, but with one last lunge forward, his hands found something to hold purchase. Another ventilation grating!

Tanlon grabbed hold with both hands fully gripping the edge of the grating, but the force pulling him back threatened to rip muscles and cords unless he relented from his grip of life and death. The power of the thing behind him was too much for a mortal man like Tanlon and he was about to let go and fall into its grasp when it loosened its pulling for just a second.

"RUN, SIR!"

The familiar voice did not need to tell Tanlon twice as he bashed the grating down with brute force and slid ungracefully to the floor below in a tumble of flailing limbs. Tanlon ignored the pain in his shoulder and jumped to his feet, away from the opening above him, but when he looked back, the screaming had ceased entirely and nothing peered back at him. Nevertheless, despite the emptiness in that place, Tanlon could not help but feel like a thousand eyes were watching him.

----------------------------------------

A bullet shot through the place where Tanlon would have been standing had he not had the foresight to instead press his back against the wall next to the door when he opened it.

"What the frig are you doing, Gourke?" Mad shouted.

"The door opened," Gourke replied as if he was commenting on the weather.

"Tanlon opened it! I swear if you just kilt him..."

"I'm fine, it's just me," Tanlon called out, but he did not step into the open just yet.

"How do we know it's not one of those flesh-wearing monsters?" Gourke asked.

"I know it ain't!"

"We don't know that for sure, trooper."

"For the love of Emperor and country...Tan, say something that'll convince the commissar that you're you."

That was a weird question, but Tanlon could not fault Gourke for being cautious. If anything, Mad should have been showing the same measure of caution that he did earlier, given that flesh-stealing freaks were likely stalking the halls.

"You can tell him that I know who put itch powder in his boots last month."

"What?!" Gourke snapped. Tanlon stepped around the door frame and raised his hands. A bullet did not greet his face, but ten raised weapons did.

Mad stepped past the troopers aiming their guns at Tanlon and approached his friend. With a gruff hand, he started patting Tanlon all over his body and peering into his gasmask's eye holes.

"You gonna snitch on me 'bout that powder?" Mad whispered.

"Depends if you're going to stop groping my armpit."

Mad gave Tanlon a rough pinch in the armpit and then swung around to face the others. "Quit pointing those at us. He's normal as he could ever be."

Gourke came up to them and gave Tanlon a sidelong glance. "Well, a thorough medical examination back at the fleet will confirm that for sure." The Commissar started down the hallway by himself. "Now then, let's get out of here."

Mad got the rest of the squad in a wedge formation and they followed the commissar up the hallway. Mad slammed the plasma caster into Tanlon's arms and grunted, "Glad you made it, bro."

Tanlon appreciatively hefted the weight of the plasma caster in his hands and looked back at Mad. "Arn't I a prisoner?"

"Eh, after the way I gobsmacked Gourke, I'll probably get put on charges too."

"What?!"

"When you was crawling in the vent back there, we heard that noise again and the black-hearted thug made a joke about sending someone to clean up after ya." Mad shook his head. "What was up there anyway?"

Tanlon was still a little shocked that Mad had punched a commissar and was still alive, but he figured if anyone could get away with it, it would be Mad. "I couldn't see."

"Hrmph. Maybe it was for the best ya didn't."

The squad carried on back to the surface without any further interruptions, but every time they passed under a ventilation grid, they kept weapons pointed at it until they passed by. Natural light started to filter into the black tunnel and every man's spirits were raised at the prospect of finally being under the open sky again.

Until the sound of screaming and gunfire shattered those hopes.

Mad led the squad to the lip of the tunnel entrance and the troopers beheld a battlefield scene of blood and fire. Melted weapon emplacements, broken bodies, and troopers dashing all over the mountain plateau in organized counterassaults against Yabanchi hordes flooding from the valley below them. Yet one sight in particular dragged their gaze above the rest of the sights. Some creature flew in the afternoon sky, gleaming with an iridescence that scattered a rainbow of color filtering through the membranes of two large wings. It dove for a group of troopers firing their rifles at it and passed by, quick as it came. Yet as it flew by them the soldier's uniforms spontaneously ignited and sent the burning men jumping off the cliffs to the rocks below in an attempt to escape the pain.

Tanlon could not believe it. He had seen these creatures in the story books he read as a child, but now one of them had flown from the pages and come to nightmarish life.

Mad asked the question they were all thinking, "Is that a friggen dragon?!"