by Guy Haley
Piles of discarded outer clothing lay in drifts around the civilians. They were listless, sipping water from canteens distributed by the Therions. Children squalled or drowsed. None played. The air was turning sour with the smell of human waste. The warehouse was equipped with two ablutorials for the warehouse workers, beyond inadequate for a thousand people.
The Therions standing guard in the pit were worst off. They worked slowly, made lethargic by the tropical climate, as they carried buckets of water around the hall. They were in high demand, and as soon as they had emptied their buckets into canteens and waiting cups, they slouched off to fetch more. Their uniforms were soaking with sweat. Those manning the screening desks were irritable.
There was a voxmitter hanging on a hook from the rail. Caius picked it up, and took a breath. The air was warmer than his lungs. It was an odd feeling. Like drowning.
He rehearsed the words he would say before he spoke. His grasp of the local language was good but not perfect. He did not wish to look a fool.
‘People of Carinae!’ Caius’ voice emerged, metallic from the hailer’s horn. Echoes from plasteel walls and shipping containers turned it more inhuman still. The plastek of the mouthpiece was obscenely warm against his lips. ‘The war to liberate you from the oppression of the tyrants of this system continues. Unfortunately, our plan to allow you to return to your homes has to be revised.’
The people stirred. Murmurs rose.
‘We’re suffocating! You can’t mean to leave us in here?’ one shouted.
Caius continued without acknowledging the interruption. ‘Shortly, we will begin removing you from this warehouse to the safety of our voidships, where you will be cared for until the situation here is resolved.’
The atmosphere changed immediately. A tension formed over the crowd. Caius moved the horn away from his mouth. His finger relaxed on the voxmitter’s trigger. Crowds were dangerous if handled poorly. He must choose his next words carefully. He had no idea what to say.
A man in long, orange robes got to his feet. His two wives and a gaggle of children were bunched around his feet. He wore a single strand of beads running from a piercing in his ear to one in his nose, marking him out as a low-ranking official.
‘What situation?’ the official demanded. ‘What has happened?’
Caius weighed telling the truth. Frantically whispered conversations broke up the warehouse hush. There were so many that they threatened to drown him out, even though no one raised their voice. The noise was maddening, conspiring with the addling heat to make his head spin.
He brought the voxmitter to his mouth again. Honesty would have to serve.
‘Your leader released a viral agent into the city. All areas except this one are contaminated. If you are to live, I must remove you. I promise that you will return home as soon as is possible.’
He realised his mistake as soon as he spoke.
Cries of alarm went up from the crowd.
‘What? Does he mean they are all dead?’ he heard someone say. The rest was a cacophony. He tried to catch what they were saying, but their language was too fast and too new to him.
‘It’s a lie!’ shouted the official. He had to try several times to make himself heard. ‘It’s a lie!’ The people quietened a moment. ‘Don’t you understand?’ said the official. ‘Arch-Comptroller Agarth has no such weapons, and if he did, why would he use them on his own people?’ The noise swelled again. People were shouting this time. The official held up his hands and lowered them, pushing down the noise. ‘It is a lie to make us compliant.’ He flung up an accusing gesture at Caius. ‘They’ve taken the city. They’re going to enslave us!’
Already close to panic, the crowd began to rise.
‘They’re going to kill us!’ someone else shouted.
The Therions at the desks pushed their chairs away and took backward steps away from the crowd, their hands straying to their pistols. The few sentries down in the warehouse moved to join them, bringing their guns up to readiness but not yet aiming them straight at the crowd. The Carinaeans being questioned were stranded uncomfortably between their captors and their own people.
‘What if he’s right? What if he’s telling the truth?’ A lone voice of reason, quickly lost.
Caius could see where it was all going. He sped down a sickening slide of inevitability.
‘Stand down!’ he shouted through the voxmitter so hard his words growled with distortion. ‘I am not lying. The city is contaminated.’
‘Let’s go. They can’t stop us,’ the official cried. ‘Bring them down! They are few, we are many! Open the main cargo doors – they lead into the handling area. That’s the quickest way back to the residential sectors. They can’t stop us!’
‘Stop!’ shouted Caius. But the official was right: he couldn’t stop them.
The crowd lunged forward as one. Seven rapid cracks of las-fire snapped into the crowd. Those hit fell and vanished under milling robed bodies. The line of men and women hit the Therions.
The Carinaeans towered over the Therions, and though they were muscularly feeble, they were used to moving under the city’s weak artificial gravity. They outnumbered the guards hundreds to one. The Therions were swallowed up without a trace.
‘Do not open the doors!’ shouted Caius. The companionway juddered. Men with determined looks on their faces were running up the steps leading from the warehouse floor. The balcony sentry ceased shooting into the crowd and turned his gun on the men rushing upwards.
‘Do not open the doors!’ Caius repeated.
The boarding trooper’s gun cracked sharply. One of the men tumbled backwards, head over heels into those behind him. Children were screaming; women huddled over their offspring to protect them as the crowd pushed forward in a single, roaring mass.
A yellow light spun around above the giant cargo doors.
Someone had got to the door controls.
A wheezing klaxon sounded. The building, short-lived whine of machinery engaging trembled the walls. Locks disengaged, and the doors drew back, interlocking teeth parting like a sideways mouth.
A gust of fresh air blew in from the octagonal handling area next door. Turntables, cranes and other idle machines stood motionless on the far side, radiating a pleasant, metallic cool. Other doors leading to other warehouses stood closed in each wall.
The relief of temperature change was so great that the crowd faltered. They closed their eyes and let the sweat dry to salt on their faces.
Eyes opened.
‘See? See?’ shouted the official. ‘They are lying! There is no plague!’
‘Sir, you must leave,’ said the boarding trooper. He grabbed Caius’ shoulder and pushed him back behind him. ‘I will hold them back.’ He set his shoulders, gun couched and ready, to await the attackers advancing up the switchback flight of stairs.
Caius watched numbly. He was paralysed. Cold air blew up at him. He should have called the guards at the top of the stairs leading into the hangar. He should have done something, but all he could do was watch. The scene had the distant quality of an old memory, like he was reliving some trauma he had experienced long ago.
The crowd moved into the handling area, slowly at first, but when no one stopped them they began to run. Impetuous young men first, then everyone. They swarmed around the machines, heading for a pedestrian corridor whose small mouth opened at the side of one of the handling area’s great gates.
People disappeared within.
The first scream came a few seconds later.
The crowd slowed. People at the back craned their necks. Those nearer the front backed away. A man emerged from the corridor, slamming into the line of people behind him. His screams passed from throat to throat, until they flooded from one room to another, and everyone was shouting, pushing to get back into the warehouse they had been so keen to escape. The crowd compressed into a wa
ve against the back wall, the people merging into a brightly coloured solid. There was nowhere for them to go. People screamed with their last, squeezed breaths.
From the corridor in the handling area the afflicted came. They ran strangely, a drunkard’s reeling. Hands flailed at the clothes and arms of the running Carinaeans, latching on firmly. When a person was caught, they were yanked back and down, disappearing under a flurry of clawing fingers and snapping teeth. A Therion rose, bloody from his earlier beating, and shoved his way through the churning crowd, only to come face to face with an afflicted and be pulled down a final time.
‘Sir!’ the Therion sentry called urgently over his shoulder. ‘Get out of here!’
The men rounded the last angle of the stairs. Escape was their only goal. Caius knocked the sentry’s gun aside as he fired, sending the las-beam wide.
Stirred into action, Caius shouted to his would-be killers. ‘Up the stairs, into the hangar!’ He activated his vox-bead. ‘Let them through – when they come, let them through!’ He had no time to wait to see if his order was heeded. Once again, he spoke through the voxmitter. Screams vied with his commands. Those of the afflicted were terrible, yowling grunts. The noises of animals sick with madness.
A man came to a stop in front of him, willowy fingers clenched for violence, his face scrunched with uncertainty.
Caius took command.
‘Up the stairs!’ he shouted up into the man’s face. ‘Get up the stairs! It’s the only way out!’
The man backed off, puzzled, then turned and ran after his fellows. No more challenged Caius.
‘You!’ he said to the sentry. ‘Pick off the afflicted. Clear a route for the civilians.’
The trooper nodded. People wary of the stairway leading up to the lone, small door at the top of the chamber and its armed guard now scrambled for it desperately. The crowd pulled slightly at the side as more and more of them took the stairs, unravelling into a skein of individuals. They threaded themselves up the steps. The afflicted followed.
The sentry was firing as quickly as he could, charge lights on his lasgun blinking down to zero. Caius ran back up into the hangar. The sentries at the top had the fleeing men on their knees with their hands on heads.
‘Section three-three-two, section three-four-five, cover this door!’ shouted Caius. Men left their tasks, snatched up guns, and formed angled lines around the door. ‘Get them off their knees and out of here!’ he shouted, pointing at the Carinaeans. ‘Open all drop-ship ramps. Begin evacuation procedures immediately. Save as many as you can. They are coming!’
The hangar burst into activity. Milontius dutifully trotted up to his master. He handed one of his two las-rifles to Caius.
‘Praefector?’ asked Milontius.
‘The damned are coming,’ Caius said. He flipped the rifle onto its side. The charge indicator was a solid green. He marched to the end of the lines of men covering the door. ‘Do not shoot the civilians. I repeat, let them be. The victims of the anima-phage are in pursuit. Kill them all.’
‘How do we tell the difference, sir?’ asked Milontius.
‘You’ll see,’ said Caius. He spoke into his vox-bead. ‘Sentry, return to the hangar.’ He waved to a group of boarding troops with black stripes down the front of their enclosed helmets. ‘Shield bearers, take up station, five either side. Prepare to hold and close the door on my command!’
The men picked up breaching shields neatly stacked at the side of the hangar and waited tensely by the door.
More Carinaeans ran out of the stairwell head. They faltered at the line of guns.
‘Move!’ screamed Caius. ‘Into the ships!’ Other men joined in his exhortation in a mixture of Gothic and mangled Carinaean.
People were piling out of the stairhead, shunting the first arrivals into motion. Caius pressed his lasrifle into his shoulder and counted the fleeing men, women and children as they passed. Fifty, a hundred. A flash of white armour appeared in the rush of multicoloured robes. With relief, he saw the sentry had made it out. Command’s greatest burden was ordering men to lay down their lives.
Another ten, another twenty. Caius urged them on with his mind as he waited, finger on trigger. Beckoning officers directed the running Carinaeans out past the firing line to others who guided them onto the nearest drop-ship. It was close to full. Turbines whined, building speed, then the noise of their spinning was lost to the whumph of ignited plasma jets. His men were filing aboard their transports. The first lifted off, hot backwash scorching Caius’ neck. It slid out through the atmospheric shielding and turned into a steep climb relative to Zenith-312. Seamlessly, a replacement came into the hangar, turned on the spot, and landed, its ramp already extending from the rear. The engine nacelles vibrated with continued output, running hot for a quick getaway.
Another ship took off, not quite loud enough to mask the desperate cries sounding up the stairs. A few more of the willowy natives of Zenith-312 lunged into the hangar, their faces white with terror at the death snapping at their heels.
A tide of afflicted Carinaeans burst through the door after them.
‘Fire!’ roared Caius. His words were lost in the scream of drop-ships, but his men were already shooting.
The narrow triangle of space delineated by the Therions and the hangar’s wall lit up with ruby beams. They were short-lived, almost gone before they registered on the eye, but so numerous they made a flickering interlay on the air, as if a divine artisan were in the process of weaving threads of light.
The afflicted tumbled down, smoking holes punched through their bodies.
‘Section three-four-five, withdraw,’ Caius shouted, so loudly his throat hurt. ‘Shield teams, force brace, push them back, and force the door closed! Section three-three-two, cover and assist.’
Were it not for the terror of the situation, Caius would have paused for a prideful moment to watch his men act with perfect discipline. Section 345 peeled off, still firing. Half of section 332 advanced in a double line. The shots of all focused on the doorway. The other half of the section dragged bodies out of the way to clear a path for the breacher teams, who locked their shields together as they neared the door, boxing in the afflicted, pushing them back towards the wall and doorway. When the edges of all the shields were touching, all thirty men of section 332 ran at the shield bearers, forming a scrum to support the boarding teams against the weight of the afflicted pushing at them.
‘Close the door!’ ordered Caius.
A light spun around over the doorway. A klaxon began a grunting call. The door was heavy, void-proofed should the hangar integrity fields fail, and powered by a mighty cog running in a toothed track.
The door rumbled halfway closed, and ground to a halt. Limbs jammed the workings. A soldier reached through to yank the obstruction free and screamed, snatching back an arm ribboned with fingernail marks. The afflicted jumped and scrabbled at the tops of the breaching shields, trying to scramble over. Those that came close to succeeding were executed by the squad sergeants. One drilled a Carinaean through the head, spraying half-cooked brain matter over the howling mob behind.
‘It’s not going to close!’ yelled the sergeant.
Caius got to the back of the knot of men pressing against the horde. He craned his neck, trying to see over their heads to the door. The drop-ships were leaving. The hangar was emptying of people.
‘We’ll have to dash for it,’ he said. He summoned a pair of squads from section 345 already aboard their transport. ‘Line the gangway. Prepare for our retreat. We’ll cut them down as we pull back. Section three-three-two first, heavy boarding squads after. Boarding squads, present sidearms!’ he ordered.
‘Present sidearms!’ echoed their sergeants.
Laspistols, inferno pistols and a pair of lascutters were locked into place in the shields’ firing loops. He wondered if there was enough firepower there to incinerate the d
ead. The blast would be ferocious, probably turn the corridor into a furnace, but it would likely fuse the cog to the tooth track. If it shut, all well and good. He doubted it would.
‘Section three-three-two, prepare to fall back!’
Again, the commands were relayed by the powerful voices of the Therion sergeants.
‘Boarders, fire!’
The boarders opened up with their weaponry. Lasguns did a neat job of killing. The rest did not. Lascutters were not intended for combat, being short-ranged tools for slicing into ship hulls and bulkheads that required careful setting up, but when the right occasion arose they could be deadly close-range guns. Fans of las-fire flicked out, cutting the foremost members of the mob down. Fusion pistols flash-cooked men who exploded into roars of superheated gas. Gobbets of steaming meat rained down. A spot landed on Caius’ face, burning him.
The door was choked with the dead. Body fat burned, liquefied and ignited from exposure to the periphery of melta-beams. Black smoke bellied out into the hangar.
‘Section three-three-two, fall back!’ Caius yelled.
The men broke from their bracing positions and ran as fast as they could for the waiting ship.
The breaching squad took the full brunt of the resurgent horde. A second round of fire bought them a moment of grace, and set corpses jamming the stairwell fully ablaze.
‘Run!’ screamed Caius.
The squad abandoned their heavy shields and turned tail, revealing a vision of hell in the corridor.
Scores of afflicted Carinaeans shoved their way out of the stairwell. They were on fire, their eyes cooking in their sockets, their fat running as liquid flame from their limbs, their skin sliding off them in rags. They didn’t feel it, but kept on coming until their bodies gave up, burned through, and they rolled about in heat-tightened balls upon the deck before they expired.