‘If it was anyone’s fault, what happened,’ said Arex, ‘it was mine.’
‘No.’
‘I’m the one who brought us both down here.’
‘But you couldn’t have expected… I mean, mutants, this many floors up!’
‘It happens,’ said Arex, ‘more often than you might think, and this time… Didn’t you wonder how the PDF got here so quickly, in such numbers?’
Gunthar frowned. ‘You think they...?’
‘I think they were patrolling these skyways. I think they were expecting trouble. I told you, Gunthar, I heard Uncle Hanrik talking about… well, I don’t know what, but I think there’s something wrong. Something… something below. And if that “something” is driving the mutants up here…’
They looked at each other, and Gunthar could see the same thoughts, the same fears, reflected in Arex’s eyes that were whirling about in his own head.
‘They think,’ she said softly, at last, ‘Uncle Hanrik and the rest of them, they think that what happens down here, it doesn’t affect us – but it has to, one day.’
‘Will I see you again?’ asked Gunthar.
Arex smiled. ‘Of course you will. Soon. I’ll contact you.’ She leaned in close, slid her hands around to the back of his head, and before he knew it their lips had met and he was melting into her kiss, breathing in her blossom-scented perfume, feeling her warmth in his arms.
It ended too soon. Arex broke away, and she was climbing the ladder again, out of Gunthar’s life, and this time he knew he couldn’t call her back because this time there was nothing left to say. Nothing, he realised, but the most important thing, and he had left it too late now to say that.
He should have given her the amecyte ring.
Chapter Two
Hieronymous Theta.
An obscure world, located near the outer rim of the Segmentum Tempestus.
A relatively new world, Commissar Costellin noted. Its population still hovered just below the nine billion mark, and a third of its surface had yet to be built over.
Like many new worlds, Hieronymous Theta was still rich in mineral deposits. Its major industries were based around the extraction and working of those minerals. The planet paid a good proportion of its tithe to the Emperor in adamantium and plasteel.
Hieronymous Theta was a sheltered world, the Imperium maintaining a strong grip on the systems around it. Thumbing his way through the data-slate in his hands, Costellin saw that neither the world nor its closest neighbours had been touched by the smallest recorded conflict. It was perfect, he thought.
‘Will that be all, sir?’
Costellin looked up, surprised. He thought he had dismissed the Guardsman who had brought in the slate. He recalled that, in fact, he had only made a dismissive motion with his hand as he had settled into his reading. He ought to have known better.
Costellin had spent almost thirty years – since he was a young man, barely out of his thirties – assigned to the Death Korps of Krieg. If he had learned one thing in those years, it was that Death Korps soldiers, on the whole, could not take hints. They didn’t respond to body language or moods. They needed explicit orders.
The Guardsman stood rigidly in front of the commissar’s broad desk. Even here, in the controlled environment of the troop ship, he wore full combat dress. His greatcoat, trousers and boots were charcoal grey, the colour of the Krieg 186th Infantry Regiment – although, as few Death Korps regiments chose any colour other than grey or black, this didn’t exactly distinguish them from the crowd.
The Guardsman’s helmet, gloves and backpack were all in place. His lasgun was slung at his side. Most egregiously of all, he still wore his full facemask. A length of thick rubber tubing connected its mouthpiece to a rebreather unit in a square, leather carrying case resting against his chest.
Costellin didn’t know the name of this particular soldier. He didn’t know the names of any of them. Only a few Krieg men had names, and it was not common practice within the regiment to use them. On paper, they were just numbers to him – as indeed they were to the colonels and the generals who deployed them in battle.
In person, they were less than that.
Krieg had been classified a deathworld, its atmosphere toxic. Costellin understood that, as a consequence, its people wore their filtration systems as they wore their skins. Despite this, before his transfer to a Krieg regiment, he had imagined the masks would have to come off some time. He had been wrong.
The masks distanced their wearers, even from each other. In contrast to the other regiments with which Costellin had served, he had seen few strong bonds formed among Death Korps men. They trained, fought, ate, slept alongside each other, but there was no friendship, not a trace of camaraderie, between them. This was a regiment of strangers – and, as the years had gone by, Costellin had come to suspect that this might just have been the point.
‘Yes, yes, that’s all,’ he said, waving the nameless, faceless soldier away from him again. The Guardsman saluted, pivoted on his heel and made for the door.
‘I was wondering,’ said Costellin, halting him in his tracks, ‘how many of your platoon might be going planetside. I did circulate a memo. It’s just that we have four regiments aboard this ship. It might be polite to give the Hieronymous authorities some warning if we are about to descend upon them in force.’
The Guardsman stared silently at him, for a moment longer than Costellin felt entirely comfortable with. The round, dark eyepieces in his mask shielded his thoughts and lent him an eerie, hollow-eyed look.
‘We will be staying aboard the Memento Mori, sir,’ he said. ‘We have a schedule of combat exercises planned for the next six days.’
‘We’re all entitled to time off, Guardsman,’ said Costellin. ‘In fact, we’re a good way overdue, having stayed with the campaign on Dask as long as we did. The Administratum has gone to a great deal of trouble to arrange this layover.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I am sure that, whatever exercises your lieutenant has planned for you, they are voluntary.’
‘Yes, sir. We all volunteered, sir.’
‘Of course you did,’ said Costellin with a sigh. After all this time, he didn’t know why he had even bothered to ask. In this case, it had probably been out of embarrassment; his brain had been racing to come up with a reason for having kept the man waiting as long as he had.
‘One more thing,’ he remembered, ‘as long as you’re here. You can convey my congratulations to Major Gamma on his recent promotion. Tell him I’ll catch up with him as soon as I return, and we can go through the new troop allocations then.’
‘Major Gamma, sir?’
‘I mean, Colonel 186,’ Costellin corrected himself. ‘Although, while you’re at it, you should probably congratulate Major Gamma – the new Major Gamma – too.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Costellin knew he should have delivered the messages in person, but for once, he thought, his duty could wait. It wasn’t as if the gesture would have been appreciated – and, as of 06.00 this morning, he was officially on leave.
He returned his attention to the data-slate, but caught himself a moment later and looked up to find the Guardsman still standing to attention in the doorway.
‘Thank you, that’s all,’ said Costellin. ‘Dismissed.’
The Guardsman saluted again, and the door slid shut in front of him.
Costellin suppressed a small shudder. He didn’t know where it had come from. After all, he should have been used to dealing with the Death Korps by now. Sometimes, though, he found they still got to him – their lack of visible expression, of discernible emotion, of the smallest trace of empathic feeling.
He put such thoughts from his mind. He skimmed the rest of the slate, absorbing more details about Hieronymous Theta. Its capital, Hieronymous City, was currently enjoying a temperate au
tumn. Rainfall this year had been below average.
Not that the weather mattered much to him. Costellin intended to spend his six days’ leave indoors, in bars, in restaurants, in entertainment venues, revelling in the long-denied pleasure of simple human contact.
And the best thing by far, if he knew his regiment at all, was that there wouldn’t be a single member of the Death Korps of Krieg within thirty thousand kilometres of him.
Costellin felt the deck plates trembling beneath his feet.
He moved to the side of the corridor as a Death Korps platoon rounded the bend ahead of him. They had formed up in threes and were doing circuits, their heavy boots falling perfectly in step so the entire ship seemed to ring with each impact. The watchmaster at their head ordered them to ‘eyes left’, and threw a crisp salute in the commissar’s direction. Costellin returned it, and waited patiently for the remainder of the platoon to pass him by.
Sixty pairs of those hollow, dark eyes, fixing him with their blank stares.
Sometimes, Costellin wondered what they saw when they looked at him: a silver-haired, beak-nosed old man who had lived to an age few of them would see.
Through a concave window, he looked down onto a cargo deck. Another platoon had cleared themselves a small training space, by stacking wooden crates precariously against the wall. They were clad in black, so must have belonged to the 42nd or the 81st, he couldn’t see their shoulder flashes from here to tell which.
The Guardsmen were bayoneting sandbags, onto which, curiously, images of their own kind had been stencilled. Costellin had once questioned a watchmaster about this, to be told in a dull but self-assured monotone that the greatest potential threat to any army came from within its own ranks. The Memento Mori was equipped with a proper gymnasium and a firing range, but Costellin didn’t doubt that both of these would be in use, and booked up solid for the next six days.
In contrast, the wardroom was empty but for one other commissar: a balding man with sagging jowls whom Costellin had not seen before. The Krieg officers tended to eat with the lower ranks, having risen through those ranks themselves.
Costellin picked up his meal from the hatch and, because he felt he should, took a seat across from his opposite number. He introduced himself, and learned in return that the other commissar’s name was Mannheim, freshly posted to the Krieg 42nd.
Of course, Costellin knew what the subject of their conversation would be.
‘I was only on Dask for a month and a half,’ said Mannheim, ‘I only saw the final stages of the campaign there, but I can tell you this much – the resolve, the sheer grit I saw displayed by those men…’
‘But?’ Costellin prompted. He knew there would be a ‘but’.
‘You must have served with other regiments before you came to this one,’ Mannheim said guardedly.
Costellin nodded. ‘The Catachan Fourteenth.’
‘Jungle Fighters.’ Mannheim was impressed. ‘I’ve heard they can be difficult.’
‘Not especially,’ said Costellin casually, ‘if you know how to deal with them. I earned their respect and their trust, and they more than earned mine. The Death Korps remind me of them, in some ways. They fight as hard, and are just as unshakeable. You know, the combined Krieg regiments have the lowest desertion rate in the Imperial Guard. It’s as near as damn it to zero.’
‘They certainly aren’t afraid of dying,’ said Mannheim, mumbling thoughtfully through a mouthful of food.
‘In the right cause, no.’
‘And don’t get me wrong, they are perfectly respectful. When I give them an order, they jump to it.’
‘You just don’t know how to relate to them,’ Costellin guessed.
‘When I talk to them, it’s like… I get nothing back from them. I can’t tell what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling. What is it that drives them, Costellin?’
Costellin smiled tightly. He had asked himself that question more times than he could count. He hadn’t yet found the answer, not completely.
The men of Krieg didn’t discuss their past – to them, it was a source of shame – but, three decades ago, Costellin had made it his business to learn all he could about his new regiment, and this had included their history.
It had been a surprisingly arduous task. Much of what had been written about Krieg and its people had been lost – in some cases, he suspected, deliberately expunged – from Imperial records. One single, dreadful fact, however, was beyond doubt.
Barely a millennium and a half ago, Krieg had been lain waste by the bloodiest and most brutal civil war ever known to mankind.
It began, Costellin explained to Mannheim, when the corrupt and decadent Autocrats who ruled the planet declared themselves independent from the Imperium. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the citizens were outraged by this heresy.’
‘Of course,’ said Mannheim.
‘So, the Autocrats sent their private armies out into the streets to crush any and all resistance. They almost succeeded.’
The man credited with the salvation of Krieg was one Colonel Jurten. When the Autocrats made their move, Jurten had been in the hive city of Ferrograd, mustering a single Imperial Guard regiment. He had acted quickly, seizing control of that city, turning it into a rallying point for the resistance movement.
Of course, Jurten and his brave men had been outnumbered thousands to one – and their enemies had had far greater resources than they, including control of the planetary defences. The Imperium couldn’t get a force through the Autocrats’ blockade to help the struggling Krieg loyalists. Jurten was fighting a war he couldn’t win – at least, not through conventional means. Then, buried beneath the Ferrograd hive, in a secret vault constructed by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the colonel had found a cache of forbidden weapons, antique devices of death, that were anything but conventional.
‘The greatest hero in Krieg’s history,’ said Costellin, ‘is the man who destroyed it. Jurten decided that, if the Emperor couldn’t have his world, then nobody could. On the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, he detonated those missiles in the atmosphere.’
Mannheim had forgotten his food. Pink sludge dribbled off the edge of his spoon. ‘Then that… that’s why the air on Krieg is…?’
‘The missiles destroyed the ecosystem,’ Costellin confirmed. ‘Jurten killed billions of his own people, but he also evened the odds against him. The war raged on for another five hundred years, but at last the victors emerged.’
‘The Death Korps,’ said Mannheim.
‘They were forged in that nuclear fire.’
‘Have you ever seen Krieg yourself?’
‘Just once,’ said Costellin. ‘I set foot on its surface just once – and I wish to the God-Emperor I hadn’t.’
They ate in silence for a few minutes more, Costellin giving his fellow commissar time to absorb all he had just heard. Then, in a lighter tone, he said, ‘Look on the bright side. We’ll both be dining rather better than this tonight.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mannheim. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be going planetside. My regiment, they’ve decided to–’
‘Combat exercises,’ said Costellin, ‘and you feel you ought to stay with them.’
‘Well, yes, yes, I do.’
‘They don’t need you at the moment. Take this opportunity while you can. It’ll be a long time before you get another one, believe me. The Departmento Munitorum has a habit of forgetting to apportion leave to Death Korps regiments, and the Death Korps regiments have a habit of not complaining about it.’
‘All the same,’ said Mannheim, ‘I feel I should spend the time to get to know these men a little better, to understand what my role is here.’
‘If morale is so high in the Death Korps of Krieg, if discipline is no problem, then you don’t understand why they need commissars at all.’
‘You always seem to know what I’m
thinking.’
Costellin smiled. ‘I’m not yet so ancient that I don’t remember thinking the same things myself – and you will find the answers to those questions, some of them at least. In the meantime…’ He pushed back his chair and picked up his empty plate. ‘In the meantime, I’ll be heading for the drop-ships as soon as we make orbit. I’d advise you do the same. Relax. Bring back some real food.’
He turned, and caught his breath as he almost walked into a Death Korps soldier, who had come up behind him without Costellin having heard him.
The Guardsman saluted. ‘Commissars Costellin, Mannheim,’ he said flatly – and then, he spoke the very last words that Costellin had wished to hear: ‘Your presence has been requested on the bridge, sirs.’
The bridge door was adorned with a large leering skull, two metres high, but the painting was old now, fading and flaking. Costellin caught Mannheim frowning at the bleak image, and he smiled to himself.
The area around the captain’s chair was crowded, with two black-coated Krieg generals and all four regimental commanders already present. Costellin acknowledged the newly-appointed Colonel 186 with a nod. A masked face turned towards him, but the colonel gave no other indication that he had seen the commissar at all.
As always, a small army of servitors scrabbled about the dark edges of the circular chamber, manipulating the panels of runes set into the curved wooden walls. Costellin was just glad that, with the ship out of warp space, its mutant Navigator had presumably retired to her quarters; her presence always made his nerves itch. He glanced at the giant hololithic display, but saw only a few distant points of light in the infinite blackness through which they were journeying.
He knew Captain Rokan, of course. The short, stocky Navy man squirmed about in his seat to greet the newcomers with a look of relief. Costellin exchanged brief pleasantries with the captain, and introduced him to Mannheim, while they awaited the commissars of the 81st and the 103rd. Their voices were the only ones to be heard, and they echoed from the walls and returned to their ears too loud.
Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 60