As soon as the gathering was complete, one of the generals spoke without preamble. ‘We have received a communiqué from the Departmento Munitorum,’ he announced. ‘A situation is developing on Hieronymous Theta that requires our attention.’
Costellin’s heart sank, although he had expected no less than this.
The general looked at Rokan, who hesitated, unsure if this was his cue to speak. He decided that it was, and began, ‘It seems the Planetary Governor has been having some trouble – rioting on the lower levels, that kind of thing.’
‘And is this really our concern?’ asked Costellin.
‘I know,’ said Rokan with a shrug. ‘That was my first thought too. Hieronymous Theta is a newly-settled world, relatively peaceful. Its young men are as likely to become miners as soldiers. It crossed my mind that the Governor – Hanrik – might just be panicking. This could be the first time he’s had any real problems with his underclass. Hanrik has seen service, though, and there is–’
‘There are indications of a possible xenos presence,’ the general interrupted him.
‘Just rumours so far,’ stressed Rokan, ‘or so we’re told. I don’t know. It seemed to me there might be something more to this, something Naval Command didn’t quite want to put into words. There was mention of some… some artefact that has got them all excited. I can play back the whole message for you if you like.’
‘What are our orders?’ asked Colonel 103.
It was the second general who answered. ‘As ours is the nearest ship, we will proceed to Hieronymous Theta as planned. All leave is hereby cancelled. Colonel 42 and his commissar will meet with the Governor on the ground to assess the situation.’
‘We are scheduled to rendezvous with the troop ship Divine Judgement in fifteen days,’ added the first general, ‘to take on new recruits. We will now require them to come to us, as soon as is practical for them. Captain, you will arrange this.’
‘Colonel 42 will report his findings to us within one planetary day,’ said the second general, ‘by which time all regiments will be mustered and ready to deploy.’
With that, the two generals marched out of the room, and the four colonels followed them. Captain Rokan relaxed in his seat, evidently glad to see them go. He caught Mannheim’s eye, and threw him a cheerful wink. ‘Welcome aboard!’ he said.
‘I’m not happy about this, Costellin,’ said Mannheim as the two commissars strode through the corridors side by side. ‘This secrecy… Why are the Imperial Guard involved in what appears to be a purely domestic matter?’
Costellin had had the same thought. ‘The generals will tell us what we need to know,’ he said, ‘when they decide we need to know it. In the meantime, you wanted to know why a Death Korps regiment needs a commissar. You’re about to find out.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Mannheim.
‘Your meeting today. Notice how the generals sent one of their own with you, the regimental commander no less. Colonel 42 will take a half-dozen aides with him to Hieronymous Theta, maybe a major or two. You saw how Captain Rokan reacted to being surrounded by Krieg officers, and he’s had time to get used to them.’
‘This governor chap, Hanrik…’ Mannheim realised.
‘Hanrik will be glad to see a friendly face. He’ll be glad to see a face at all. This is your job from now on, Mannheim, at least the greater part of it. You’re a diplomat first and foremost. It’s up to you to mediate between the Death Korps and the planetary governors, between the Death Korps and the civilians, the Adeptus Mechanicus, sometimes even the rest of the Imperial Guard.’
‘I see,’ said Mannheim thoughtfully, ‘to smooth the way so they can do their jobs. Still, I don’t understand why they have to be so… so… The masks and the skull motifs, the atmosphere aboard this ship…’
‘To the Korps,’ said Costellin. ‘Death is a way of life.’
‘You make them sound positively morbid.’
‘It’s a fact. As you have already observed, they have no fear of dying. In fact, they welcome it. To die in the Emperor’s service is their lives’ sole purpose. It’s an attitude our leaders have no wish to discourage, of course.’
‘And they all feel this way?’
‘Try talking to a Krieg Guardsman some time. You’ll find he has no hopes, no dreams, no desires, nothing but his orders and the prospect of a violent end. As far as he is concerned, there is nothing else. He is a dead man walking.’
‘But why…?’
‘The men of Krieg,’ explained Costellin, ‘still bear the guilt of their world’s sins. It is instilled in them from the moment they are born. They are taught they must atone for their ancestors’ rebellion – but their world is a radioactive hellhole. Krieg has no industry, no agriculture, with which it can repay its thousand-year-old debt to the Emperor. It has nothing but its children, so it gives these gladly.’
‘But surely,’ said Mannheim, ‘those children are the descendants of the heroic Colonel Jurten as much as they are of the Autocrats?’
‘They are indeed,’ said Costellin, as the two men halted at the junction at which they would part to return to their offices, ‘and that’s the second part of our job, Mannheim. That’s the other reason why the Death Korps of Krieg needs people like us: because sometimes, just sometimes, they need to be stopped from going too far.’
Chapter Three
Gunthar sat behind his desk, waiting.
Data-slates were strewn across the white plastek surface. He had shift rotas to sign off, mine quotas to adjust, personnel to hire and fire, maintenance reports to read. He was already well behind – spent too much time worrying about his date last night – and now he couldn’t settle to any of it. He stared at the comm-link terminal as if he could will it to chime. He tapped at a rune in its base, just to hear the static squawk that would reassure him it hadn’t broken down again.
Gunthar hadn’t slept. Whenever he had tried, he had seen the glaring pink eyes of the mutant or heard the dying gurgle of its victim.
He had turned on the holocaster several times, almost every hour throughout the long night, watching the latest reports. There had been no mention of the incident. He had wondered how that could be – until he remembered what Arex had said.
‘They don’t let you see this… They pretend it doesn’t exist… They think that, what happens down here, it doesn’t affect us.’
Gunthar had the ring in his fingers, and was turning it idly. He didn’t remember taking it from his pocket; his hand must have strayed to it just as his thoughts strayed to Arex. Yesterday, he had thought the ring beautiful. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
It was set with six red amecyte stones. Gunthar had chosen red because it was Arex’s favourite colour. He had chosen amecyte because it was mined on only one planet in the entire Imperium, and that planet was Hieronymous Theta.
Elsewhere, a ring like this one would have commanded an extravagant price. On Gunthar’s home world, however, amecyte was as common as glass – and, for a mine overseer able to lay his hands on rejected, flawed stones, almost as affordable.
The comm-link chimed, and Gunthar started. Suddenly all thumbs, he stuffed the ring back into his pocket as he lunged to take the call. ‘Mr Soreson,’ a gruff voice crackled over the link. ‘Herriksen here. You wanted a word?’
‘I did,’ said Gunthar. He fumbled across the desk, searching for the one slate he was sure he had left right there. ‘You sent me a report a few days ago, about something… You said you had found something down there?’
Herriksen’s reply was lost to a howling of strained engines and a clanking of chains in the background of the call, and Gunthar had to ask him to repeat it.
‘…kept digging, just like you instructed, but now we’ve unearthed…’
Another barrage of sound obscured the next few words.
‘…problem down here, Mr Soreson. Like I said i
n my report, there are these weird runes… The men don’t like those runes. They’re saying…’
It had been Arex’s words, again, that had prompted Gunthar into spending his morning going through recent reports from the mines under his supervision. He had been searching for something, anything he might have missed, anything that might have seemed insignificant before. He had already contacted three mine foremen, questioning them about small drops in yields and losses of workers. Then he had picked up the slate containing Herriksen’s report, and he had remembered.
He had hardly glanced at it, last week. He had had so much else to do, and so what, he had thought, if some miners had found a chunk of worked stone. Why did they have to come crying to him about it? It had probably been buried by the mutants on the ground, for some unfathomable reason, and worked its way down during an earth tremor. Or it had been left behind by one of the primitive civilisations thought to have existed on Hieronymous Theta before its colonisation – what difference did it make?
He had dashed off a quick reply to Herriksen. He had told him that his find, whatever it may prove to be, was of no interest to anyone. He had reminded the foreman that his mine was behind on its quotas. He had told him to keep digging.
‘…refusing to work in that tunnel. They say it makes them feel…’
An hour ago, Gunthar had called up a hololithic display of all the mine tunnels beneath Hieronymous City. He had overlaid upon this the locations of all the reported fatalities of the past six months, and he had found a significant cluster. A cluster that was centred on the north-west corner of Herriksen’s mine.
The foreman’s voice was being drowned out again, but it didn’t matter. Gunthar had heard enough. He stabbed at the ‘transmit’ rune on the comm-link’s base, and he said, ‘I’m on my way down there.’
Gunthar had worked in mining since leaving his schola at the age of fourteen. Most of his world’s young men did the same, those who escaped the draft. Despite this, he had set foot in an actual mine only twice before. His work had always been administrative in nature, undertaken in well-lit offices on the higher floors.
The mine entrances, of course, were a good way above the tunnels themselves. Still, Gunthar had to drop a few floors to reach them. This time yesterday, this wouldn’t have concerned him – but then, this time yesterday, he wouldn’t have made this journey at all. He felt his stomach churning as a heavy lifter carried his autocab down. He had taken public transport because official cars were scarce and he hadn’t wanted to wait for one. He wished Arex had called him, just to say she had made it home. If something had happened to her, would the newscasters have censored that too?
Kreuz was perched on the curved seat beside him, her eyes as blank as the data-slate in her lap. She was Gunthar’s lex-scribe – he qualified for his own lex-scribe now – and she went everywhere he did.
The cab reached its programmed destination, and Gunthar climbed out, reassured to be greeted by two proctor sentries. He showed them his identity tag, and he and Kreuz stepped through an archway into a large, dark area full of noise and steam. They were surrounded by clattering tanks and hissing pipes, with people rushing to and fro. The air in here was hot, dry and oppressive.
This was where the metal ore extracted from the ground below was smelted down. Gunthar saw an idling truck, waiting to be loaded up with the precious materials thus obtained. They would be conveyed to the nearest space port, and from there to an Imperial forge world, to be fashioned into the machinery of war.
Gunthar intercepted a burly, ruddy-faced man as he dashed between tanks. ‘I’m looking for your foreman, Mr Herriksen,’ he said.
The burly man shook his head and pointed to the yellow earplugs he was wearing. Kreuz stencilled the name Herriksen? on her data-slate, and thrust it under his nose. He nodded in comprehension, and pointed to a row of six lifters, each contained in its own metal-mesh cage. Then he made a plunging motion with his thumb, and mouthed the words, ‘Down below.’
As Gunthar approached the cages, he heard a screeching of engines and chains and a lifter rose, bearing two miners with an ore-laden barrow. An old, soot-blackened comm-link terminal was set into the stone wall, and he realised that this was where Herriksen must have been when they had spoken earlier.
He found rebreathers, safety helmets and goggles, slung from hooks beside the lifter cages. The first rebreather he tried didn’t work, but as he placed the second over his mouth, the air tasted cooler and fresher. Gunthar and Kreuz stepped onto a lifter platform and its cage door rattled shut, casting a criss-cross pattern of shadows over them. As the platform lurched into motion, two pale blue luminator strips flared at their feet, but the left-hand strip immediately faltered and died.
A moment later, they were descending through a rough-hewn stone shaft, insect eyes peering out at them from dark crevices. It was a long, slow journey, and it was made all the slower by Gunthar’s imagination, which insisted on picturing all manner of twisted horrors lurking behind those stone walls, on the lower floors of the city. Occasionally, the lifter would stall for a second, as if it had caught on something, and each time this happened he felt the sickening fear that it might not move again.
He began to ask himself what he was doing here. Trying to impress Arex? Looking for a chance to make up for his inaction last night? What made him think he could? What made him think that, given another chance to be a hero, he would be any more able to take it than he had been the first time?
Checking his chrono, he saw that a little over three minutes had passed. They had to be underground by now, he thought – and indeed, a moment later, the stone walls gave way to more metal mesh and the lifter platform dropped into a second cage. Gunthar and Kreuz stepped out of this cage into an expansive cavern, well-lit by luminator globes strung from wooden mine props.
The air here was choked with dust, and Gunthar felt an itch in his eyes despite the protective goggles he wore. Squinting through this haze, he saw dark tunnel openings and vast banks of ancient, rusted machinery. Cogitators clicked and ground to themselves, as an army of mine labourers and servitors teemed between them.
A dirt-encrusted, middle-aged man with red-rimmed eyes visible through his goggles moved to greet the new arrivals. ‘You must be Mr Soreson. From the Officio Primaris? I’m Herriksen.’ The man seized Gunthar’s hand in an uncomfortably strong grip, and pumped it hard.
‘I was expecting to meet you at the mine entrance,’ said Gunthar.
‘Too much to do down here, Mr Soreson. Well, you know how it is. Quotas to meet. I see you’ve found yourself a rebreather. There are a couple of spares by the lifters if it fails on you. You’ll be wanting to see this artefact of ours, then?’
‘I think we should,’ agreed Gunthar. Just a quick look, he thought, then he could return to his comfortable office and do what he should have done in the first place: contact the proctors, or even the PDF, and let them deal with the problem.
At least, this way, he would have a tale to tell Arex.
Herriksen led the way across the cavern, calling to three other miners to join them as he did so. The men seemed excited by Gunthar’s presence, and eager to see what he made of their find; he supposed it had been a talking point for them too.
They approached a tunnel entrance, passing the abandoned hulk of a clapped-out boring vehicle on their way. ‘Lights on,’ instructed Herriksen, and he activated his helmet luminator. The other three miners followed suit immediately, but Gunthar couldn’t find the rune on his helmet. He fumbled with it for a while before one of the miners reached over and performed the task for him. A little embarrassed by this, Gunthar made a show of activating Kreuz’s luminator in turn.
The tunnel was wider than he had expected, and the five men and Kreuz proceeded along it two abreast. The miners dropped back to allow Gunthar to take the lead beside Herriksen, a courtesy he could have done without. Even with their six luminators, he could
see only a couple of metres ahead of him through the ever-present dust. Whenever the tunnel forked, which it did a couple of times, he almost walked into the walls. He was glad of Herriksen’s assured presence by his side, guiding him.
Gunthar knew they were nearing their destination when he heard the heavy clunks of pickaxes and the shrieking of drills from ahead. Shortly, his group’s little bubble of light merged with another, and in that light he saw the glint of augmetic body parts.
‘I think I mentioned when we spoke,’ said Herriksen, ‘that most of the men won’t work this tunnel any more. I’ve been forced to rely on the servitors, and you know what they can be like. If I don’t watch over them constantly…’
Gunthar nodded, not really caring. There were ten servitors present, semi-human drones, probably grown in vats. Little better than mutants, he thought, though at least these creatures were programmed to serve the Imperium.
As mining servitors, these particular creatures had also been augmented to suit the conditions down here. Their rebreathers were bonded with their flesh, welded to their bones, replacing the bottom halves of their faces. In place of arms, they had rock drills and piston-driven hammers, while muscle stimulants and growth hormones had given them strength enough to cope with back-breaking work that would have killed a normal man. Gunthar was careful to keep his distance from them.
He was more interested in the column.
It stood at the right-hand edge of the tunnel, just a metre or so back from the end. About two metres tall – no, a little less than that, a bit shorter than Gunthar. It was like a miniature obelisk, with a pyramid shape at its top, about the size of Gunthar’s head, and a square, stepped base still partially embedded in the tunnel wall.
The column was carved out of a smooth, polished stone – and Gunthar couldn’t be sure in the dust and the dim light, but he thought it had a pale green tint.
Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 61