by Dan Abnett
Nik and I have collaborated on a number of things, most particularly raising a family, but from a Black Library perspective, it’s probably our co-writing of two Warhammer novels—Gilead’s Blood and Hammers of Ulric—that are most significant.
Over the last few years, Nik’s spent more of her time invisibly deployed as a proofreader and editor, and she remains my first reader and primary editorial filter. But in the last year she’s written two novels as the yen for writing has returned. It’s nice to see her writing again, and we were lucky to get this story before other glamorous commissions whisked her away.
In the third Gaunt arc, The Lost, and especially in the novel Traitor General, I explored themes of resistance fighting and enemy occupation, classic wartime motifs that seldom get an outing in 40k terms because they’re hard to make workable. This isn’t a return to occupied Gereon, but it’s a visit to a planet very much like it, held in the sway of the Archenemy of mankind…
Dan Abnett
CELL
Nik Vincent
It wasn’t safe to pray anywhere on Reredos.
The room was dark and cramped, and the floor beneath Ayatani Perdu’s feet was earthy and sodden, and smelt of things he preferred not to think about. His boots leaked, and his feet were trying hard to shrink from the organic dankness that penetrated through the old hide. He was trying almost too hard to concentrate on the prayer, to imbue his voice with the conviction that he did not always feel, but his discomfort was getting the better of him.
Perdu’s congregation never seemed to grow or diminish. There was room for half a dozen, and half a dozen always showed up for his services. The faces varied, depending on who was sent to do what jobs, and on who lived and who died. War changed things, and when the war was over and the occupation established, that changed things too. The resisters were the most devout and the biggest risk-takers; they needed priests, and they needed safe places where they could exchange information or pool resources. The two coincided here.
He was surrounded by men, taller and thinner than dusk shadows. They stank too. They had come off the agri-galleries, tired and hungry, but at least they didn’t have to worry about their feet. He did not envy the aching in their bones from arching their backs and stooping their shoulders to fit into the rooms that he could stand erect in, but he did envy their prosthetics, their elongated, telescopic shins and tapered spade-like feet that meant they were never ankle-deep in anything. “The Emperor protects,” he said. He wondered if he believed it. “The Emperor protects.”
The words were barely out of his mouth the second time when Perdu heard the wet thud of someone going down. The man had been standing behind Perdu. He didn’t know his name. There were no names anymore, nor conversations, nor even rumours. Three years was a long time to learn that lesson, but now, no one talked, no one shared, no one speculated. The work that was done was done quietly. His work was done only in these places, these rooms that were assigned to him, with these people, who came to him for strength and solace, who came to him because they believed, against all reason, that the Emperor would protect.
He was an agent of the God-Emperor and of the beloved Beati, and he was an enabler of the resistance movement on Reredos.
He dropped the prayer book and turned, in time to see the foetid air swirl around the collapsed figure. He bent over the body, his prayer book banging against his chest as it hung from the chain around his neck. It swung out, almost catching the dying man on his brow. He rasped a breath and reached up a hand. Perdu placed the book in the agri-worker’s hands, and reached out his own clean palm to crack the man’s chest filter.
Perdu had to bang hard on the filter, twice, before he could twist it and draw it out of the man’s chest. It was caked with a gritty purple mass of spores mixed with the mucus that the agri-workers now produced in such vast quantities that ceramite tar-buckets were used as spittoons in the drinking holes that surrounded the galleries where the men lived and worked. Perdu had seen what this crap could do to rockcrete floors, pitting and scarring, and eating away at all but the most impenetrable materials.
The congregation dispersed as Perdu tried to save one man in a world that was being eaten away and gobbed out in mucus chunks by relentless occupation forces.
The ayatani priest pushed two fingers into the hole in the man’s chest, like a kid with a jar of ploin-kernel butter, turning them around the circumference of the filter and digging out the unholy shit that had taken the victim’s breath away.
How many times had he done it before? Dozens, certainly, scores, maybe even hundreds. And how many men had he saved?
There was too much of it. Why hadn’t this damned pute cleaned his filter? He must have left it for days. Did he have some sort of death wish?
Perdu eased the man flat onto his back. He hated laying him on the cold wet filth, but had no choice. He straddled the body, placing one knee on either side of the filter, and pushed his fingers back into the cavity. The pressure of his knees pushed more of the filth out onto his fingers, and he scooped it up and flicked it out onto the floor before going back for more. The body seemed to be breathing, but it was the action of Perdu pumping his legs against the chest that was causing the rasping gulps that he could hear only too clearly in the corpse’s throat. He was a corpse. His face was grey and his lips blue. His eyes stared blankly out of his head, bulging slightly as though he’d been strangled. This creeping asphyxia was worse than being throttled; it was worse than anything.
“The Lady’s…” Perdu began as he pushed his knees once more into the corpse’s chest. He felt a rib give way, and took off the tension, dropping his knees onto the cold dank floor to either side of the body, horrified by his attempts to resurrect the man.
He drew the back of his hand across his forehead, and dropped his head down onto his chest.
He could feel the gritty mucus spreading beneath the knees of his trousers, and started to rise to his feet. There was nothing more for him to do. His congregation had left him; he was alone. Time stood still as he hovered over the body for several more minutes. His eyes shifted to the floor, to the oil-slick of purple sputum that was spreading and leaching into the ground around the corpse, around where his knees had been, bubbling, and corroding the trampled surface. The fabric of his trousers was smouldering slightly, and he tore away the ragged scraps, knowing that there was no mending the cloth.
He noticed edges in the purple mess, hard lines that shouldn’t have been there. Tentatively, he ran his fingers through the spreading mucus and began to retrieve tiny tablets of ceramite, chips that had been shaved away from Emperor-only-knew what. They were small and irregular in shape; they had been improvised.
Perdu had not seen their like before, but he knew what they were. This was not the usual useless waste of life. This death had a purpose. This man had sacrificed himself, given his life in the service of the God-Emperor to deliver the information on the ceramite chips to one of the many anonymous resistance cells in the hive.
Perdu took a flat, narrow flask from his webbing, and gently poured some of the contents into the pool of mucus, but the water had no effect. He tipped the flask between his lips, and proceeded to wash his mouth out with the remaining liquid, moving the quantity of water around and over his tongue and teeth before gargling with it, and then sending it around again. When he was satisfied, he spat the mixture of water and saliva onto the mucus, and worked the frothing mess with his fingers, fingers that no longer bore surface skin, let alone prints. He had only one pair of gloves, and he would rather risk his skin than their destruction.
After several minutes, Perdu gave up the search, and looked down at the half a dozen mismatched shards lined up on his finger.
His time was up. Suddenly, he knew that the room was no longer safe. He’d stayed too long, and he wouldn’t be able to use the site again. He scraped the chips off his finger into the still-open water flask, and pulled his gloves on. The right one would be useless by the time he took it off agai
n, but there was no time to clean himself up. He could feel the burning in his fingers as the mucus set to work to destroy his flesh.
Perdu pushed the dead man’s filter cap back into his chest, and rolled the corpse onto its side to cover evidence of the mucus; the idiot enemy wouldn’t look under the body. He did not wait for the enemy excubitors to appear with their narrow frames, distended bellies and grotesque masks. They were grey-skinned monsters with plugs and hoses embedded in their pallid flesh, harsh voices translated through grilles that produced guttural combinations of grunts and too much purple spittle.
Out on the street, the quality of the light told Perdu everything. He did not need to look up to know that a glyf was hovering nearby, six or eight metres above his position, its bright runes swirling and pulsing through the air, ready to penetrate the minds of any pute fool enough to look at it. They wafted over populated areas of the planet, checking for those who were not consented, who didn’t carry imagoes in their arms, or whose imagoes limited their free passage. They altered the quality of the air with their ethereal light, and with the buzzing insect noise they made, rising to a pitch when they homed in on some poor transgressor. Perdu smelt the hot acrid bloom of battery acid that the glyfs emitted, judged that the incessant purring noise was stable, and walked in the opposite direction.
He didn’t see the boy, his one connection to an active cell; he didn’t look for him. The lessons were slow to learn, but anything or anyone watching him would see something pass between them, and then they’d both be in trouble. He knew the boy was there; a boy was always there, waiting for the next piece of the puzzle, the next message, the next order. No one knew who was giving the orders. Perdu didn’t know any of the boys’ names, and so far as he was aware, they didn’t know his. He didn’t even know if they were all boys. He didn’t know how many other ayatani priests were involved in resisting, either. He didn’t know how many cells there were in this hive, this agri-works, on this continent, or on the planet. Singular individuals had known these details once, but they were all gone, and those left behind had learned their lessons.
Perdu retreated. He was permanently in retreat. Virtually the entire planet was in retreat. There were rumours of fighting forces in one or two of the larger hives, guerilla stuff, mostly, but very little reliable information was available from one place to another; all comms-channels were under the control of the occupying forces, albeit their security wasn’t impenetrable, and leaks were exploited at every opportunity.
Communications were necessary to the smooth running of the agri-galleries out on the great plains of Reredos, where the land had been given over to food production for the occupying forces and for export off-world. They were feeding the enemy with the fetid purple slop, the fast-growing fleshy pods that putrefied almost before they ripened, spilling out the spores that were killing the stilt-men who tended the plants. They had once provided the finest cereal crops in the galaxy. There had been no compromising the product by hybridisation, no dwarfing, no genetic modifying for higher yields, and virtually no disease-resistance. Eighty per cent of production used to go to slab for the Emperor’s armies, but the rest, the glorious twenty per cent, had provided the raw materials for the foremost hop and barley brews in the Imperium for a thousand years.
The chest filters kept out the worst of the dust from the papery old-gene-stock hops that used to be grown in the galleries, and prevented the workforce breathing on the priceless crops. The best of the stilt-men were rewarded with augmetics that increased their agility and pushed up their quotas. Not only could they tend the tallest, most fragile reaches of the plants, but their telescopic shins could be extended so far that they could also cover vast acreages of the tunnels furthest from the habs and sinks without the need for polluting vehicles.
The great, arched galleries used to spread across the plains, clean and white and gleaming; now two-thirds of them were grey and carbonised, allowing little light in through their purple-stained covers, and the canker was spreading. The hops were long-gone, torn or burned out by the guards who patrolled the agri-works, the workforce toiling around and above them, elegant, fragile by comparison to the pale, angular, barely human beasts that were their keepers.
“It’s out?” asked the old man, slouching over a beaker of something that might once have seen the inside of a barrel that might once have held hop-brew, but not recently. The woman standing on the other side of the counter didn’t look at him; she turned the cloth once more around the cloudy glass in her hand and placed it on a shelf. “No,” she said.
“The chips?” he asked, shielding the words between his mouth and the beaker he was lifting to it. “Passed,” said the woman.
“The boy?” asked the old man as he lowered the beaker back to the counter.
“No,” said the woman, moving along the counter to another customer.
They had to get the damned things out of the galleries. More of the tunnels were being cleared for replanting, and the Emperor only knew what the new crop would do to them. The carbonisation would petrify them, or the spores would corrode them, and if not that, the by-products of so many deaths among the agri-workers and the mucus that the survivors scooped out of their filters every day could do just as much harm. They were the most important resource the resisters had, the key to bringing the Imperium to the planet’s rescue.
They couldn’t stay where they were, but getting them out was proving a slow and complex business. Just getting through the first part of the process, making the chips and getting them to the priest, had cost dearly, and time and resources were short.
He couldn’t ask why the priest hadn’t handed the chips to the boy, or what the priest planned to do with them. He was at two removed, so he didn’t even know the priest’s name, or anything about him. He’d return to the cell with nothing. He often did. Nothing had ever been quite so critical; no single thing had ever signified the salvation of the entire planet.
The lasrifle banged and bucked in Bedlo’s hands when it should have made a satisfying krak and held steady. He and his cell-mates had been inside the building for two days, out of sight of the excubitors and the glyfs, trying to turn themselves into an effective resisting force. Practice made perfect.
He issued instructions and advice, his voice sounding too loud between shots. Hand signals were better if the new recruits could learn them, but weapons familiarity was the real priority.
His gakking gun was defective. It was going to take him out as readily as it’d kill the enemy. He lifted the rifle away from his body, pulling the strap over his head, and threw it away in disgust.
“That’s it,” he shouted. “Debrief.”
Wescoe shouldered her long-las and left Bedlo to it. She’d been doing this for long enough to know what the debrief would involve, and she and Mallet took it in turns to patrol the perimeter of their practice area, to keep the kids safe while they learned how to resist. It was her turn.
Mallet picked up Bedlo’s offending lasrifle and began to strip it down. He said little or nothing, ever, but he knew arms, was obsessed with them. The war had been good to him, and the occupation better.
Bedlo had come to the cell almost by accident when his own, his third, had been destroyed in a skirmish: a stupid mistake caused by one of his cell-mates butting up against the enemy during a routine sweep of their hive quarter. The resulting firelight had taken out several of the enemy guard under a senior excubitor’s command, and, looking for retribution, the enemy had deployed a grenade launcher with great effect. The whole decrepit mess of the quarter had come crashing down, and when the excubitor had counted the bodies, and realised that Bedlo and one or two others had escaped, he set a hound loose.
Whoever the enemy butcher had been, and it was rumoured that he had direct links to the Archon, he’d been thorough. There was still no effective way to take out a wirewolf, and not much chance of avoiding one, either. So this was Bedlo’s fourth resistance cell, his first as leader; he’d only been with them a m
atter of weeks when they were almost wiped out. He’d jumped two places to take the lead, and began recruiting immediately. He had no idea how long Mallet had been with the cell, but the man was indestructible. He was a born fighter, but lacked the communication skills to lead effectively. Wescoe was effective, too, and clearly a veteran, but she shrank from command, and seemed happy enough for Bedlo to take the lead.
As the cell-mates squatted or stood together in one corner of the room with their backs to the remains of the pitted, charred plasboard walls, facing the imaginary enemy should he infiltrate, Mallet tossed Bedlo the lasrifle end-over-end. The boss caught it in his right hand, and then dropped it vertically through his grip to check the balance. It was better, and there were no dodgy sounds when he caught the housing in his fist. He turned and shot a round. The bang sounded closer to a krak, but not close enough.
Bedlo tossed the weapon back to Mallet.
“If that’s the best you can do, we need a more reliable weapons supply,” he said.
Mallet started to strip the las down, again, squatting on his haunches. The boy, Tilson, closest to him shuffled sideways, widening the gap between them. The movement wasn’t lost on Bedlo. Trust wasn’t at a premium, it was non-existent.
Mallet didn’t listen as Bedlo went through the motions.
“Command,” he said, raising his index finger as the two new boys watched. “Disperse,” two fingers together, the way a child might make a finger-pistol. “Attack,” a flat hand thrust forwards. The instructions weren’t complicated, but new recruits were always a liability, whether they were young and keen or young and scared, and they were always young.
The perimeter check only took Wescoe a matter of a couple of minutes. There was only one entrance/exit point a couple of hundred metres from the room where the boys were being put through their paces, and a couple of blind corridors to the left and right of the practice room. She was good in the dark, used to it, and didn’t resort to using the lamp-pack that she carried in her webbing. She very soon wished that she had.