09 - Dead Men Walking

by Steve Lyons - (ebook by Undead)

  In another corner of the ramp, a more enterprising merchant was holding an impromptu auction for the remaining seats aboard his old, ramshackle freighter.

  Costellin had no doubt that, by now, Governor Hanrik would have contacted the Imperial Navy, asking for all the rescue ships they could spare. The best he could hope for was to save himself and a few handpicked cronies; the majority of the wretches now tugging at Costellin’s greatcoat would be abandoned here.

  One of the other drop-ships had beaten his to the surface, and the Krieg 103rd had almost completed their disembarkation. They were unloading their equipment now, trailer after trailer being towed onto the ramp by Centaur support vehicles. Two Krieg Guardsmen walked ahead of the first of these, doing what the proctors couldn’t, clearing a path through the crowd. Despite the threat of the soldiers’ lasguns, some civilians were still slow to obey, but the Centaur’s drivers had no patience with these. They were bulldozed aside, and one man shrieked in agony as a six-tonne chassis rolled over his foot on caterpillar tracks and reduced it to pulp.

  Behind the Centaurs came the more powerful Trojans, dragging heavy mortars and quad-launchers in their wake—and behind these came the big guns, massive Earthshaker cannons and the older but no less impressive Medusas. Costellin noted that, upon the emergence of these, the clamour around him dropped to a noticeably quieter level. People were stopping, staring, struck dumb by the sight of these great engines of destruction. If any of them had doubted it or tried to deny it to themselves before, they could no longer do so. Their world had gone to war.

  Costellin’s regiment was unloading now too—Colonel 186 had briefed them on the way down, so they knew what was expected of them—and the final two drop-ships were also arriving, the heat of their exhaust flames washing over the ramp as they lowered themselves onto the landing platforms. Costellin took advantage of the relative lull in the bedlam to assert some authority. His voice ringing loudly and strongly, he appealed for calm and asked for the ramp to be cleared. A young proctor lieutenant followed his lead, and began to corral the willing into a nearby hangar, reassuring them that everything was under control, that arrangements were being made at the highest possible levels for their continued welfare.

  To Costellin, the lieutenant confessed, “I don’t know what we can do, sir. We can hold a few thousand in the hangars and the waiting rooms, but there are more arriving all the time. We’ve appealed to the nearby cities, and they’ll take some refugees but they really don’t have much space themselves, and a lot of these people don’t want to go anyway. They’re worried about relatives and friends, and they’re hoping to find them here—and they’re afraid that, if they go, they’ll be dumped on the lowest levels of a strange new city, to fend for themselves.”

  “Which is no doubt what would happen,” remarked Costellin.

  “Some of them,” said the lieutenant, lowering his voice significantly, “believe nowhere on this world is safe now.” He looked at Costellin, and the commissar could see the fervent hope in his eyes, for a reassurance he could not give.

  Over in the corner, the auction had gone badly awry. A stampede of failed bidders had flattened the enterprising merchant against the hull of his freighter, and the proctors were moving in with stun batons. None of them, Costellin suspected, were going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

  He spotted a peaked cap like his own through the crowd, and he hurriedly excused himself from the lieutenant’s presence and pushed his way towards it. Commissar Mannheim was busily explaining to a group of worried civilians that, no, as far as he was aware the air had not been poisoned and the arriving soldiers were wearing gasmasks and rebreather units purely as a precaution. No sooner had he made this point, however, than a grenadier platoon marched by in their hulking carapace armour and metal skull masks, and the questioning began anew.

  Costellin took his fellow commissar by the arm and bustled him into a relatively quiet corner. “You made it down here, then,” said Mannheim, stating the obvious.

  “I didn’t have much choice,” said Costellin. “One minute, I was in my bed, dreaming of six days’ leave, waiting for you and your colonel to report on rumours of civil unrest and mysterious artefacts. The next…” He waved his hand to encompass the hectic scene around them. “What’s going on, Mannheim?”

  “I wish I knew,” said Mannheim. He looked tired. “I truly wish I knew. We were at Governor Hanrik’s suite in the High Spire, Colonel 42 and I, when the lights went out. His men flew us back here, to our shuttle, to vox the troop ship, and then… We were in the flyer, Costellin, when the reports started to come in. Beetles. Flying metal beetles, causing the most incredible devastation. One PDF chap was reporting in when he was swarmed by them. He was dead within ten seconds.”

  “Beetles,” repeated Costellin numbly.

  “Well, that must have been when Hanrik gave the order to evacuate. As it happens, that was the generals’ wish too, but by the time we had spoken to them… By that time, the first of the evacuees were fetching up here, those from the lower levels. The lifters in the city aren’t working, you see. The only way out is on foot, through the old gates on the ground, through the mutants and the underclass.”

  “Is the Governor here?” asked Costellin.

  “I haven’t seen him,” said Mannheim. “They were sending a flyer back for him, the last I heard.”

  “They know,” said Costellin with quiet certainty.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The generals,” said Costellin, “they know. They suspect, at least. You tell me, Mannheim, does it seem at all credible to you that they should have organised all this, be so sure there is a threat to this world worthy of the attention of four Imperial Guard regiments, without their having the slightest idea of what that threat might be?”

  “Nothing has been established for sure,” said Mannheim.

  “They know,” said Costellin again. “You know it too, Mannheim. You’ve been in the service long enough to have heard stories like this one before.”

  Mannheim nodded cautiously. “Unexplained power drains.”

  “Xenos artefacts, buried deep in the ground as if there was somebody on this world before us. Tell me, have the generals seen the markings on those artefacts?”

  “I saw them,” said Mannheim. “Hanrik showed us hololiths of fragments of stone—before the blackout, I mean. He showed us tracings of glyphs, from a column that was discovered in the mines, and I… I swear I have never seen anything like them before. It made my eyes itch just to look at the images of them.”

  “And the beetles,” prompted Costellin. “The metal beetles.”

  “The troop ship captain, Rokan,” Mannheim remembered, “he said he thought Naval Command were holding something back from him.”

  “And our generals will do the same,” said Costellin. “Until they have undeniable proof, they will keep their suspicions to themselves, while preparing for the worst. They won’t dare speak those words. They won’t be the first to cry necron.”

  “Commissar.”

  Costellin turned. He had thought himself alone in this part of the drop-ship, in the vacated troop compartment, his footsteps resounding from the curved walls as he paced back and forth. He wondered if Colonel 186 had been standing there all along, or if he had just seen his commissar returning to the ship and followed him.

  “Can I help you?” asked the colonel, blandly.

  Costellin shook his head. “Just gathering my thoughts.”

  “It may be wise to gather them elsewhere. I have instructed the servitors that, once we have unloaded, they are to return to the troop ship.”

  “Can’t that wait? I need to use this ship’s comms.”

  “I don’t want the drop-ships remaining in port,” said the colonel. “They are a temptation to the stranded refugees, and we can’t spare the men to guard them.”

  “I need to talk with the generals,” said Costellin. “I still have questions.”

  “We are setting up c
ommunications on the ground,” said the colonel. “The generals will be able to contact us should our orders change.”

  “It may be too late by then. Have you heard of the necrons, colonel? No, of course you haven’t. Few living men have. Most of those who have encountered them, if they have survived the experience, have been driven insane by it.”

  “Necrons,” repeated the colonel, rolling the word on his tongue as if he relished the fresh taste of it, the prospect of a new enemy to fight.

  “Back when I was a young man,” said Costellin, “it was forbidden to even speak of them. Still, the rumours persisted. It was said the necrons are an ancient race, that they were already dying when the eldar were young—and that, to save themselves, they sealed themselves into great underground tombs and slept. It was said that the necrons have slept for millions of years, and that now they are awakening.”

  “You suspect there are necrons on this world?”

  Costellin sank into one of the empty flight seats. “Look, colonel,” he said, “I know you’re newly promoted, I know this is the first time we have worked together—”

  “We have fought side by side before. We shared a trench four years ago on Anakreos III for two months. I was a lieutenant in Gamma Company at the time.”

  “Right. What I am trying to say is that, in a position like mine, you… hear things; things that, perhaps, it might have been best not to hear. I have heard tales of worlds on which necron tombs have been discovered, and of the inevitable fates of those worlds.”

  “Whatever the threat to this world,” said the colonel, “my men will meet it.”

  “Perhaps,” said Costellin, “with an army such as we had on Dask—but we are four regiments, colonel, and depleted regiments at that. I just wonder, if what I suspect is true, if direct confrontation is our best strategy in this situation. We might be better advised to, if you’ll pardon my language, get the Golden Throne out of here!”

  “Reinforcements are en route from Krieg,” said the colonel.

  “I suspect it’s not ground troops we need,” said Costellin, “but rather a battery of cyclonic torpedoes that can blast this whole damned planet to space dust. But, of course, Hieronymous Theta is rich in minerals, a valuable resource to the Imperium.”

  “You have still not explained why you wish to speak with the generals.”

  Costellin sighed, resignedly. He saw no point in saying any more.

  He knew the men of Krieg well enough by now to understand how their minds worked. He knew that, under normal circumstances, the Krieg generals would never have pitted their regiments against a necron force, a force whose numbers and capabilities were virtually unknown. They would have run their battlefield projections and concluded that the risk of defeat, of destruction, was far too great.

  But then, these circumstances were unusual.

  By the Emperor’s grace, the Memento Mori had been close at hand when the situation on Hieronymous Theta had been reported. They had a rare chance here, to respond to a necron incursion—if such this proved to be—in its earliest stages. They were gambling that their troops could contain that incursion before it took hold, before it could spread to engulf this world and perhaps many others. They were gambling on a chance to strike a decisive blow, perhaps the first decisive blow, against an enemy the Imperium had only just been compelled to acknowledge, one it hadn’t even begun to work out how to counter.

  And the stakes of that gamble were some twenty thousand men.

  “You know I will fight for the Emperor to my dying breath,” said Costellin. “I just fear that the mission we are embarking upon here may be in vain.”

  “Our lives are His to do with as He pleases,” said Colonel 186.

  He really did sound just like his predecessors.

  They were setting up makeshift tents on the hill around the space port, building a refugee camp that was swelling by the minute. An endless convoy of Imperial support vehicles ground its way down that hill, filling the air with the noxious fumes of two hundred grumbling engines. The pinpricks of the vehicles’ headlights now stretched to the city’s fortress walls, built to keep the lower levels contained, and they were spreading around them in each direction.

  Costellin’s eye line was about level with the tops of those walls. Rising above them, Hieronymous City was a dark, brooding shape against the clouded moonlight. He regarded its disconsolate towers, the criss-cross struts of the connecting skyways, and he searched in vain for a sign of movement, of life, of hope.

  Hundreds of thousands, millions, of people were trapped in those towers, on those skyways, behind those walls. They were trapped by a lack of transport, by concern for loved ones, or simply because they couldn’t leave all they knew behind. They couldn’t have known it yet, but from this vantage point it was perfectly clear: the city was already dead. Costellin only prayed that the same could not be said for this world, and for the soldiers who were about to fight so blindly to protect it.

  He thought about a backwater bar on a backwater world, and a well-lubricated inquisitor speaking in hints and whispers of the horrors he had read about in the most secret archives, tales of the dead come back to life and clad in living metal.

  He thought about a decorated veteran of a distinguished regiment, confined to a secure sanatorium wing, babbling like a lunatic about weapons that could strip a man down to his immortal soul, one layer at a time.

  He thought about a report he had once read, filed by the legendary Ciaphas Cain, concerning a campaign fought on the frozen world of Simia Orichalcae. The report had been redacted, of course, the threat faced by Cain left unnamed, but two facts had impressed themselves upon Costellin’s mind: that said threat had emerged from the planet’s mine tunnels, and that Simia Orichalcae had ultimately been destroyed to contain it.

  He thought about metal beetles, and runes that made a commissar’s eyes itch.

  And he thought about the recently concluded war on Dask, where at least he had known what his regiment was fighting, and to what end. He felt they had accomplished something there, shone the Emperor’s light on that benighted world, but even this great victory had not been without cost.

  They had lost so many men on Dask, almost a third of their complement. Costellin was so tired—so tired of being the only one who cared.

  Chapter Six

  Gunthar had no idea where he was. He had never strayed this far from home before.

  It was too dark for him to see much, anyway. He was just following the people in front of him, who in turn were following the people in front of them, who in turn were following the luminator beams of a squad of soldiers.

  To begin with, Gunthar had felt as trapped by the press of bodies around him as he had during the mutant attack last night. This was almost worse, in fact, because he didn’t know what he was running from this time. He had no idea when or how or from which direction a threat might come, let alone how he might avoid it if it did.

  By now, however, he had settled into the rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other, and his nerves had been numbed by tedium. He hadn’t heard any explosions or screams for almost an hour. Whatever was happening in Hieronymous City, hopefully the worst of it was over. Gunthar wondered how much further it was to the city walls, and then over them to the space port.

  It had already been a long day. He had spent the afternoon with one proctor official after another, then with a couple of PDF officers. He had related the story of the artefact in the mine tunnel over and over again, omitting the part where he had fled like a coward. Returning to his office, he had received a call from the Governor himself and had told the story one more time. He had felt important for a while, the centre of all this attention. Then he had just felt tired.

  He had spent the evening organising the mine shutdown, as the Governor had instructed. Each of his foremen had had questions, but Gunthar had been told to say as little as possible so as not to panic them. “I know about as much as you do,” he had assured them, “but I’m s
ure this is just a precautionary measure.”

  He had sent Kreuz home. Alone at his desk and undisturbed by the chiming of the comm-link terminal, Gunthar had felt his eyelids growing heavy and remembered that he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. The next thing he recalled was waking in a pitch black room, to the sound of amplified voices from outside.

  He had had to grope his way to the stairwell, knocking his ankle and skinning his knee in the process. He had climbed two floors to the nearest skyway, where PDF soldiers had instructed him to join a guided human convoy, ten people wide and more than sixty deep. The whole of the city was being evacuated but, when Gunthar had asked why, he had been told: “I know about as much as you do, sir. I’m sure this is just a precautionary measure.”

  Progress thus far had been painfully slow. The convoy stopped at every tower for the soldiers to employ their loudhailers and wait for more bewildered refugees to join them. Some were unhappy about being herded from their homes in the middle of the night, and there were questions and arguments to deal with. Nevertheless, few people were game to be left behind. The convoy had more than doubled in size, until Gunthar could no longer see how far behind him it stretched.

  He heard a trooper talking on his vox-handset, and was pleased that at least they weren’t totally cut off from the rest of the world. The trooper gave the convoy’s position, and received directions in return. It seemed they would have to take a diversion, because… Gunthar wasn’t sure if he had heard that right. A skyway down? What did that mean? How was that even possible?

  The nocturnal cold had sunk into his bones. He rubbed his arms through the fabric of his grey work tunic, but it didn’t help much. He wished he had put on a coat that morning, but then he could hardly have known the day would end like this. For that matter, there were several things he wished he could have collected from his hab before… He suppressed that thought. Everything would be all right, Gunthar told himself. The Emperor would provide.