The Killing Ground

by Graham McNeill

  'Attraction to what?'

  'To wherever they died,' said Mesira. 'Whatever it was that brought Captain Ventris here was something terrible, something that feeds on death and bloodshed. Khaturian was like a magnet to it.'

  'You say it's gone, this thing that brought Ventris here?'

  Mesira nodded. 'Yes, it was barely even here, but its power was so great that the walls that separate us from the warp were worn much thinner, and they were already thin enough.'

  'Superstitious nonsense,' blurted Shavo Togandis. 'This is a pious world, Mesira. Yes, we have our troubles, but we are conscientious in our suppression of psychics.'

  Barbaden chuckled at Togandis's unspoken accusation.

  'Our faith keeps the warp at bay,' said Togandis, 'as it always has and always will.'

  'You think so, Shavo?' cried Mesira. 'Then you are a fool. Why do you think this system is so fractious? What do you think brought us here in the first place? The warp bleeds into the nightmares of this system's people, stirs their sleep and twists their dreams with thoughts of death and war! And now it's in ours.'

  Mesira was wringing her hands, as though desperate to scrape the skin from her bones or clean them of some imagined taint. Barbaden saw the light of madness in Mesira Bardhyl as fresh tears coursed down her cheeks.

  'You must have felt it,' she wailed. 'We were there! Oh, Emperor save us, we were there!'

  Barbaden stood before Mesira and took her shoulders in a tight grip.

  Her words trailed off and she looked up into his eyes. 'I'm sorry... I'm sorry, please,' she whispered. 'I don't want to live like this, please... I can't.'

  'Shhh,' he said. 'Be quiet now.'

  She nodded jerkily, hugging herself tightly, and Barbaden shook his head at such a pitiful display of weakness. He returned to his seat and slid into the comfortable leather, a sure sign that the audience was at an end.

  Verena Kain handed him a snifter of vintage raquir, the one thing on Salinas he had actually developed a taste for, her desire to please him as transparent as her desire to succeed him. He smiled and sipped the liquor, enjoying the biting crispness at the back of his throat.

  'You are dismissed,' he said.

  CHIEF MEDICAE SERJ Casuaban had spent so many years in the House of Providence that he no longer noticed the smell of blood. The very walls, though scrubbed regularly by rusting and wheezing servitors were so ingrained with the vital fluid that no amount of labour could completely erase it.

  How many lives had ended in this wretched place, he wondered.

  The answer leapt immediately to his mind: too many.

  His boots rapped harshly on the grilled walkway as he made his way through the wards that ran the length and height of the central tier of the facility. It was a daily irony to Casuaban that three Capitol Imperialis, an example of the mightiest war machines ever created by the Imperium, should be shackled together to create a medicae facility.

  He snorted at such a description. True, many people did leave the House of Providence alive, but they were shadows of their former selves, most with limbs missing, their bodies covered in hideous scars or otherwise disfigured by the infernal ingenuity of mankind in wreaking harm on one another.

  Ten years of conflict between the administration of Leto Barbaden and the Sons of Salinas had cost the people of Salinas dear.

  Casuaban was a tall man and was forced to stoop several times as he made his way through the facility, the sounds of people dying all around him. His hair was the colour of the iron walls and his face was craggy and lined, like worn leather left out in the baking sun. He had the bulk of a former soldier, but age and ten years without weekly fitness standards to meet had added flesh to his bones.

  Orderlies and nurses worked the wards, tending to the hundreds of people who filled the place. They nodded to him as he passed. In some faces he saw grudging respect, in others wordless tolerance. He knew that he could expect no less.

  He made his way into a side compartment, a room that had once housed the fire control systems of the war machine's defensive weapons. Iron sprung beds were packed in tightly, each one home to a pathetic, broken shape that only superficially resembled a human being.

  He nodded to the orderly fitting a drip over the nearest patient. A box bleeped erratically and trailing wires ran from the cracked display to the heartbreaking shape that lay in the bed.

  'How is she?' Casuaban asked.

  'How do you think?' was the answer. 'She's dying.'

  Casuaban nodded and stood at the end of the bed, trying to remain dispassionate as he lifted the girl's notes and read how her condition had changed during the night.

  Her name was Aniq and what was left of her stirred on the bed. He had been forced to amputate both her legs above the knee and her left arm was missing from the shoulder down. Aniq's entire body was a mass of gauze and synth-flesh, a desperate attempt to keep her from death, an attempt Casuaban knew was doomed to failure.

  Aniq and her family had been caught in the middle of a firefight between the Sons of Salinas and a patrol of Achaman Falcatas that had spilled into the dwellings on the southern edge of Barbadus. Solid rounds and las-bolts had torn through the Chimera chassis that Aniq's family called home, the ricochets killing her parents and ripping into both her legs and her left arm. A volatile mixture of home-distilled fuel had exploded in the fight and had bathed her body in chemical fire.

  The girl would die tonight. She should have died days ago, but she was strong and Casuaban knew it was his duty, his penance, to fight as hard to save her as she was fighting to live.

  'Increase her pain medication,' Casuaban told the orderly.

  'It won't matter,' said the orderly. 'The girl won't live.'

  Suddenly angry, Casuaban snapped, 'She has a name. It is Aniq.'

  'No, she's just another salve to your conscience, medicae,' snorted the orderly and walked away. Casuaban ignored the man and went to the drip regulator, adjusting the flow of Morphia himself. He might not be able to save her, but he could ease her suffering at least.

  Casuaban had seen enough of war in his service with the Falcatas to last any man a dozen lifetimes. He had hoped that when his time with the regiment was at an end he would be able to retire somewhere warm where he could spend the last of his days trying to forget man's capacity for violence. He had never dared dream that the Falcatas would earn the right to claim a world of their own. After all, what regiment ever really got to muster out?

  You heard stories about worlds settled by heroic regiments of Imperial Guard, but no one ever actually got to do it, did they?

  But the Falcatas had it.

  Designated an army of conquest by General Shermi Vigo, they had claimed Salinas as theirs, but instead of an end to war and the establishment of a Falcatan dynasty, the conquest of Salinas had become a poisoned chalice.

  And Casuaban's vision of a peaceful retirement had vanished like mist.

  He remembered the day his dreams had died.

  It had been upon the Killing Ground, amid the ashen wasteland of Khaturian.

  In the aftermath of the slaughter, he had walked the hellish warscape in a numbed daze, the streets and few remaining buildings filled with bodies that had cracked and twisted into foetal positions such was the infernal heat that had engulfed the city.

  That had been the day his world had turned upside down, when his every belief had been shattered and his quest to atone had begun. He looked down at the small girl once more, trying to stem the tide of regret that he felt every time he saw her.

  What had she done to earn the wrath of Leto Barbaden and the Achaman Falcatas?

  Nothing. She'd done nothing. She had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, like most of the people in the House of Providence.

  'You didn't deserve this,' he whispered.

  The girl's eyes flickered open at the sound of his voice and her mouth moved soundlessly, her eyes pleading for Casuaban's understanding.

  He crouched beside the b
ed and leaned in close to her, her voice little more than breath on his cheek.

  'You were there,' she whispered, and he flinched as though struck.

  Casuaban rose stiffly to his feet, his heart hammering in his chest. He backed away from the bed, the girl's wasted form now unutterably dreadful to him. He turned and all but fled the chamber, moving as though in a fugue state.

  Serj Casuaban made his way through the wards, adjusting drug levels, making notes on charts and burying himself in a hundred other tasks to keep his mind from dwelling on what he had heard.

  Darkness was beginning to fall and exhaustion had all but claimed him by the time Casuaban finished his rounds, the little light that pierced the windows fading to twilight grey before he had noticed. Naked glow strips hung from cables screwed into the corridor roofs and the sickly glow made him feel faintly nauseous.

  He made his way back through the central section of the House of Providence and climbed the stairs to the control bridge, where lord generals and warmasters had once plotted destruction on a massive scale. The almost bare room was home to a compact desk, a couple of chairs, the low cot bed where he had spent many an uncomfortable night and a wall of locked drug cabinets.

  Casuaban dropped the notes he had made on his rounds onto his desk and slumped into the hard, iron chair behind it. The words he had heard from Aniq's mouth and in his darkest nightmares echoed in his skull and he knew that there was one sure method to dull the ache and pain of them. He opened the drawer and lifted out a tapered bottle without a label and a pair of shot glasses, both of which he set on the desk and filled.

  'There's no point in hiding,' he said. 'So, join me for a drink.'

  A shadow detached itself from the wall and Pascal Blaise took the seat opposite Casuaban.

  'Hello Serj,' said Pascal. 'How did you know I was here?'

  'Unlike everything else in here, you don't smell of death,' answered Casuaban.

  'Ironic, don't you think?'

  'Perhaps,' said Casuaban, 'if I gave it any thought. What do you want?'

  'You know what I want,' said Pascal, lifting the glass of raquir and taking a sip.

  'I can't spare you any more medical supplies, we're running short as it is.'

  'So ask Barbaden for more.'

  'He'll say no.'

  'Not to you he won't.'

  'You love this, don't you?'

  'What?'

  'The fact that the medical supplies your men use come from Leto Barbaden.'

  'There's a certain poetic justice to it,' admitted Pascal, 'but that's by the by. We took some casualties today.'

  'I heard,' said Casuaban. 'You hit Verena Kain's Screaming Eagles.'

  Pascal grinned. 'Aye, we did. She got away, but we hurt the bastards.'

  'How many wounded do you have?' asked Casuaban.

  'Too many: ten dead and another sixteen wounded. My men are hurting and we need fresh bandages, morphia and counterseptic.'

  'I can't spare that much,' protested Casuaban. 'Bring your wounded here.'

  'Don't be foolish,' warned Pascal. 'You think that Barbaden won't have Nisato and his goons watching this place for that?'

  Casuaban laughed. 'You're here aren't you? You tell me who's being foolish.'

  'I know how to make my way around without being seen,' said Pascal, 'and there's only one of me. I think they might notice sixteen wounded men being brought in.'

  'I can't ask Barbaden for more,' said Casuaban, though he could hear the defeat in his voice. He knew he would give Pascal what he wanted, had known it the moment he had sensed the man's presence in his office.

  'I know this sits badly with you, Serj,' said Pascal, offering some conciliatory words as he saw the defeat in Casuaban's face, 'but you know you're doing the right thing, don't you?'

  'The right thing?' said Casuaban. 'I don't even know what that is anymore. I thought I did when I served with the Falcatas. I'd seen too many young men and women blown apart by your bombs, listened to them scream and cry for their mothers, to do anything but hate you. I hated the Sons of Salinas and everything you stood for. I had the certainty of hate.'

  'Then came the Killing Ground,' said Pascal.

  'Then came the Killing Ground,' repeated Casuaban. 'After that, I was lost. I watched Leto Barbaden order the attack and I knew it was wrong, but I didn't say anything, not until it was too late.'

  Pascal drained the last of his raquir and placed the glass down on the desk.

  'When you and Cardinal Togandis are ministering to the needy of Junktown tomorrow, leave the supplies in the marked Leman Russ. You'll see the signs.'

  An awkward silence descended. 'You haven't asked about... him,' said Casuaban.

  Pascal licked his lips. 'He's still alive?'

  'He is,' confirmed Casuaban. 'Did you even doubt it?'

  'Sylvanus Thayer always was a tough bastard,' said Pascal, glancing nervously towards the stairs that led back down to the wards.

  'Do you want to see him?'

  'No,' said Pascal, 'not even a little bit.'

  Casuaban watched as Pascal made the sign of the Aquila across his chest.

  He laughed. 'Now that's irony,' he said bitterly.

  URIEL LOOKED OUT over the city as it slipped into darkness below. From this height, it looked peaceful, but the ambush this morning had given the lie to that impression. Barbadus was a city at war with itself, held by Imperial forces, but wracked by dissent and insurgents who fought their rightful rulers every step of the way.

  Though Uriel did not like Leto Barbaden, he was the rightful ruler of Salinas and no amount of insurgency would change that. Salinas had been won for the Imperium by an army of conquest and the world was theirs to rule in the name of the Emperor.

  Yet something nagged at the back of Uriel's mind, a suspicion that all was not as it seemed, that secrets lurked beneath the surface and would radically alter his view of this world's dynamic were he to learn them.

  He turned from the shimmering, shielded window and returned to the quarters that had been assigned to them. As far as places of confinement went, it was a great deal more comfortable than some he had been forced to occupy. Two beds, large by any normal measurement, yet small in comparison to a Space Marine, occupied opposite walls and two footlockers sat empty at their ends, though neither he nor Pasanius had anything to put in them.

  'You see anything interesting out there?' asked Pasanius.

  His friend sat on the floor, idly rubbing the stump of his arm and watching him as he paced the length of the room. Pasanius appeared utterly calm and Uriel envied the sergeant's ability to find a place of stillness within himself, no matter what their circumstances.

  'No,' he said, calmed by the very act of watching Pasanius. 'It all looks peaceful now.'

  'Then sit down for the Emperor's sake, you'll wear a groove in the carpet,' suggested Pasanius, lifting a bronze ewer from the floor beside him. 'Have some wine. It's not as good as the vintages bottled on Calth, but it's eminently drinkable.'

  Uriel lifted a goblet from a table beside the bed and sat on the floor opposite Pasanius. He held out the goblet and Pasanius duly filled it. He took a long drink, enjoying the taste, despite Pasanius's reservations.

  'Not bad,' said Uriel.

  'It'll do,' said Pasanius. 'Ah, but do you remember the Calth wines?'

  'Some of them,' said Uriel. 'Why the sudden interest in my home planet's wines?'

  'A wonderful dialect they spoke in the caverns,' continued Pasanius. 'I remember the first time I spoke to you. I could barely understand a word you said.'

  'It had its own character,' admitted Uriel, beginning to see where Pasanius was going.

  'I remember it took years for you to shake that accent,' said Pasanius. 'Do you still remember any of it?'

  'Some,' said Uriel, switching to the heavily accented dialect of the deep cavern dwellers of Calth. 'It's the kind of thing that never really leaves you.'

  Uriel had been six years old the last time he had spoken l
ike this, but his enhanced memory skills allowed him to access the language centres of his brain as though it had been yesterday.

  'That's it,' laughed Pasanius, also switching to the same Calthian speech patterns, a dialect that no one outside Ultramar would have any hope of understanding. Certainly any eavesdroppers on this conversation would be lost and even the most sophisticated cogitating machines would struggle with so specific an argot.

  'Subtle,' said Uriel, raising his goblet in a mock toast to Pasanius.

  'I have my moments,' replied Pasanius.

  'I remember the last time we sat with a drink like this,' said Uriel.

  Pasanius nodded. 'Aye, on the Vae Victus, in the Tarsis Ultra system. A grand victory that was.'

  'I suppose,' agreed Uriel, 'but won at a cost, and look where it got us.'

  'There you go, always looking for the clouds instead of the silver lining,' said Pasanius. 'Look where it got us? We saved Tarsis Ultra. We saw the daemon creatures of Honsou destroyed and we're on the way home. Think of the good we've done, that we'll go on to do.'

  Uriel smiled. 'You're right, as always, my friend. You have a rare gift for cutting through to the heart of things.'

  'It's a well known fact that sergeants are the real brains in any army,' said Pasanius.

  'Then what's so important that we switch to Calthian dialect?'

  'We have things to talk about,' said Pasanius, suddenly serious, 'things best not heard by others, things we need to have clearly stated between us.'

  'Very well,' agreed Uriel. 'Things like what?'

  'Like the Unfleshed. When are you planning on mentioning them to Barbaden?'

  'I don't know,' admitted Uriel. 'I had thought to say something once we'd established our credentials, but having met the man, I'm not sure.'