Free God Emperor of Didcot by Toby Frost

He cocked the hammer of the Civiliser.
    Rhianna ran to the door, stood up on tiptoe and slid back the bolt. She turned the handle, pulled it to her and let in the night air. In the doorway stood a praetorian sentry, its back to them, coat stirring slightly in the evening breeze. Rhianna froze, hand over mouth, eyes wide.
    Suruk stepped forward, silently picked Carveth up and put her to one side. The Ghast rubbed its antennae together. Suruk raised his big knife, and it dropped with a low whup through the air. The Ghast crumpled and thumped against the tarmac; its head rolled away.
    Smith looked back round the corner. One of the troopers was pulling a long-tailed biogrenade from its belt, and Smith flicked up the Civiliser and shot it in the arm. It dropped the grenade and the bomb landed upside-down, its legs and tail thrashing.
    Smith looked back round. ‘Come on!’ he cried. The grenade went off with a massive flat bang ; there were howls and snarls from the corridor. Rhianna scooped up her satchel and they fled.
    *
    ‘Who wants a beer?’ Gilead strode into the spaceport with a cooler box under his metal arm.
    The sides of spacecraft loomed up around him like cliffs, disappearing into the night thirty yards above his head. Most were transport shuttles, used to ferry tea up to the enormous container ships the Empire would send to collect the monthly supply. They weren’t going anywhere now, Gilead noted with satisfaction. The planet was cut off.
    His men stood about in their armoured battlesuits, talking and joking, guns in hand. They were the best fighting men in the universe, Gilead thought. ‘Beer!’ he shouted, and he shook one of the cans as he threw it to a lieutenant and laughed helplessly when the soldier opened it and beer sprayed across the man’s visor.
    On the opposite side of the spaceport a row of praetorians waited for the Ghast leader to arrive: grim, silent things that watched with disinterest and contempt.
    They stood in formation out of instinct.
    Two chuckling Edenites in blue-grey battlesuits were supposed to be guarding the tarmac: they were currently studying an issue of Horny Heretic Harlots . One of the Ghasts stepped over and shoved them aside.
    ‘Silence!’ it barked. ‘The high commander comes!’
    With a wet sound like meat being pulled apart, a hatch slid open in the back of the command ship. A ramp folded down, smooth as a snake’s tongue. Foetid smoke billowed from the rear vents and a figure appeared at the top of the ramp, as if coalescing from the smoke. Slowly, his helmet under one arm, 462 walked down the ramp as the praetorians jolted to attention.
    462 wore a trenchcoat covered in insignia. His right eye was gone and, with graceless efficiency, his technicians had replaced it with a metal lens. The skin around the eye was dented and scarred, like the back of an ancient toad.
    His scrawny body propelled him to the bottom of the ramp and, as one, the Ghasts crossed their main arms over their chests, punched their pincer-arms into the air, banged their heels together and flicked their antennae, quiveringly erect. ‘ Ak nak! ’
    ‘ Ak ,’ 462 said casually, and one of his pincer-arms made a vague wave.
    ‘Hey 462!’ Gilead called, steering a slightly erratic path across the tarmac to the bottom of the ramp. Several beers had done him no good. He thought of putting his arm around 462’s shoulders, but decided against it. ‘Too bad you missed the fighting. How’s it hanging?’
    462 looked round at his stercorium, an organ shaped like an insect’s abdomen that protruded from the back of his trenchcoat. ‘Large and red,’ he said.
    ‘Uhuh. You want a beer?’
    ‘No. I shall have an injured drone pulped for nutrition.’ His eye flicked across the spaceport, taking in the decadent human control tower and its puny landing pads. ‘I have orders for the Hyrax before he installs himself as Governor-Prophet-Emperor-God-King.’
    Gilead’s head nodded, and something