by Guy Haley
‘I will not be a slave,’ said Dostain with fresh resolve. The sensation of Pollein’s hand slipping into his only strengthened it.
‘Very well then,’ said the thing. Without another word, it scampered away, hurling itself at the base of the rock, where it vanished with a bang. Pollein clapped. Dostain ran after it and threw himself at the base of the obelisk, much like the thing had. He landed in dewy, spiky furze-grass.
He placed his hands on the cool stone in wonder. There was nothing there. No crack, not even a shadow to suggest one. He looked up. The stone looked more like an obelisk than ever, pitted with hollows that might, once, have been carvings. He shook his head. They were just hollows. It was just a stone.
What had happened could not possibly have happened. Already it felt like a dream.
His aunt called him. Her pretty brow was creased, and her skin had gone a little grey.
‘Let’s go home,’ she said tiredly.
Chapter Seven
The surrender of Matua Superior
MATUA SUPERIOR
GERATOMRO
082998.M41
Seven hours after the spaceport fell, Matua Superior’s lord-civil sued for peace and offered unconditional surrender.
The next day the army entered the city arrayed for the maximum show of strength. The tanks of the Seventh Paragonian Super-Heavy Tank Company went in first, followed by those of the Atraxian 18th. Lesser tanks and armoured fighting vehicles came in column behind them, their commanders standing sternly in full dress uniform in their turrets. Every tank had been washed and had pennants affixed to their antennae. Over them swarms of servo-skulls darted, blasting out martial music and messages intended to calm the population, all short and to the point:
‘Rejoice, for the Emperor embraces you!’
‘Yield the traitor unto justice, and live illuminated by the light of Terra!’
‘Clean minds have nothing to fear.’
‘Clemency is offered to the man who turns his weapon on the traitor.’
Among this aerial swarm of skulls there were other, more sinister devices. Scout and augur cybernetic constructs scoured the buildings either side of the city’s main way with their sensoria. Squads of Atraxian Guard Paramount patrolled the rooftops. Sniper teams lurked on the ledges of tall buildings. All was unnecessary. Matua Superior had been cowed.
Flights of landers roared into the spaceport, bringing more men down to speed the reconquest of the world. Among them came a Titan coffin ship, its arrival timed to coincide with the parade.
From outside, Matua Superior had seemed to suffer during the assault, but much of the city appeared untouched, the damage being restricted to certain areas. Many windows had been blown out, and as the tanks rolled past block after block of whole buildings, they would suddenly come across a toppled edifice, reduced to a pile of broken rockcrete and fused glass, or a perfectly round crater punched into the ground by a lance strike. In such places, the roads had been bulldozed clear. The population lined the streets, dirty and thin from months of siege, but waving their flags and shouting enthusiastically in what seemed to be a genuine show of gratitude. Bannick kept his eyes forwards, but he could not prevent the occasional sorrowful face from catching his eye. Bereaved mothers, or men who knew they would be called up to fight far away from home, never to return, now the Imperium was tightening its grip on Geratomro once again.
The weak, orange sun was warm, and the plasteel of Cortein’s Honour soaked up the heat and reflected it back. It was a pleasant heat, not like the broil of the Baneblade’s interior. The sight tapped Bannick’s guilt, and it flowed freely. He was clean and warm and well fed, and though the food he ate was little better than swill, and he was weary to the bone, his situation was far better than these wretches on the pavements of the city, cheering him on like dumb farmers welcoming sho-beasts into the pens of their cattle.
They couldn’t all be traitors. He expected the truth was complex and sad, that they would do whatever they were told, and that their opinions might flip back and forth no matter how strongly held. The black-and-white truths he had been taught as a child – truths that he had never had the wit to question – were anything but as stark as he had once thought. All was grey. His brief time with the mutants on Kalidar had helped crystallise this conception, although the change had begun earlier, he suspected. He wondered if he had killed any of these people’s kin that so desperately cheered for him. Almost certainly, he thought. If it weren’t for his first-hand experience of the greater threats facing mankind in the stars, he would have been ashamed. But he hardened his heart as his upbringing had intended it to be hard. Behind the broken remains of one toppled set of certainties, he saw the truth – the real truth – and the horror of it exceeded the injustice meted out to individual men millions of times over. The truth of the Imperium was not about oppression, or conformity, or a will to dominate the minds of every human being for the sake of it, but to do so to prevent extinction. Every time the guilt at killing his fellow man threatened to overwhelm him, he imagined the skies of Geratomro full of the drop-ships of orks.
The further they proceeded into the city, the lesser the damage. The centrum was free of it. Office and administration buildings stood untouched. The emblems of Imperial Adepta were on many. Soon they would begin the work of administering this city for the benefit of mankind again.
At the very centre of Matua Superior was a vast square, dominated by a basilica to the Emperor. A stage had been set up in front of the cathedral gates, covered in bright cloth and lined with the standards of the regiments fighting upon Geratomro. Of the dozen or so there, only half were familiar to Bannick, those of Paragon, Savlar, Atraxia and the new raisings from Bosovar. With three differing army groups merging in orbit around Geratomro, it was to be expected that the others would be exotic to him. A lectern carved in the shape of the aquila, wings outspread, sat in the centre. Two iron gibbets stood a safe distance away from the stage, their doors open. Wood was piled high around their bases. A ladder led up to each.
The tanks of the Seventh drove down the centre of the square, their column stopping fifty feet to the left of the centre of the stage. The tanks of the Atraxian 18th pulled up alongside. Engines roared and revved, then fell quiet. Behind, the Leman Russ battle tanks of the victory parade drove out to the edges of the square, shattering paving slabs under their heavy treads, and forming a hollow square around the plaza. Then men marched in to fill that square, representatives of every regiment. Savlar Chem-Dogs stood to attention next to proud Atraxians in their bulky carapace armour. Paragonians lined up behind pink-skinned Bosovar in rag-tag uniforms. There were others Bannick had no idea were even present in the system, including strange warriors with crested helms and archaic looking armour, ranks of female soldiers, disciplined units of Cadia, and a cohort of fearsome ogryns, who meekly followed their commissar officers to the front.
A fraction of the forces in the system, but representative of their bewildering variety.
When the square was full, half the swooping servo-skulls sailed off down the streets leading from the four sides of the plaza. There were no Geratomrans in the square, only the warriors of the Imperium. Bannick had no idea if the locals had private pict screens or vox-casters, but the skulls would ensure what occurred there would be shared by all in the city.
The sun passed behind the basilica’s twin towers, putting them all into shadow, and Bannick shivered. As if this obscuring of the light were a signal, the cathedral doors creaked open. From within strode Captain-General Iskhandrian himself, accompanied by a large entourage of priests, Adeptus Mechanicus, fleet personnel, Departmento Munitorum and assorted other functionaries. Behind them, escorted by members of the Atraxian’s elite Guard Paramount, were a number of others, all Geratomran. Ten of them were led to the front of the stage, where they knelt facing outwards in the position of the penitent, a Guard Paramount behind each. Two oth
ers – an overweight noble and a second, thinner man in the uniform of the local defence militia – walked grim-faced to the podium. The nobleman stood tall with proud bearing despite his corpulence. The military man produced a sheet of paper and spectacles, and began to read.
‘I, Colonel Maden of the Geratomran Planetary Defence Militia, do hereby announce the surrender of the city of Matua Superior to the forces of the Imperium of Man. We have erred from the path, and regret our actions. Not for the fate that will befall us, but for the sorrow we have caused the Lord of Mankind. We are but insolent children ignorant of the Emperor’s wisdom. May He find it in Himself to forgive us, and show mercy to our people for the cowardice of we, their ruling classes, who abandoned our duty to further the reach of the Imperium for our own ends, so imperilling the world and its population. On behalf of the people of this city and region, we renounce the rule of our traitorous planetary governor, Governatrice Missrine Huratal, and her court of serpents. A man has but one duty in life, and that is to the Most Holy Emperor. To ignore one’s conscience and obey the orders of the traitor for fear of reprisal is as great an act of treachery as any other.’
Then he handed his paper and spectacles over, and unbuckled his weapons. These too were taken by the Atraxians. He knelt down, as did the lord-civil of Matua Superior. Together they prayed, heads bowed, while priests blessed them, too quietly to be heard in the ranks. The soldiers were silent. Gusts of wind cracked the tanks’ pennants. The square was a graveyard, full of bodies bereft of animation.
Bannick was saddened to see this act of prayer used in such a flagrantly manipulative way. Servo-skulls with pict capture devices imaged it from every angle. The moment before death when a man asks for the Emperor’s benediction should be private. But Bannick had been ordered to watch it all, so that when images of the surrender were disseminated across the subsector, the planet could see the weight of the assembled armies’ disapproval, and he looked ahead unflinchingly.
The men finished. They were taken to the foot of the ladders leading to the gibbets, into which they climbed willingly. The heavy cage fronts were locked closed. For all his dignity, the lord-civil of Matua Superior was too fat to be comfortably accommodated. The ogryns showed their amusement at his flesh pressing out through the lattice with rumbling bass laughs, silenced by hard words from their commissars.
‘In these cages, those who defied the orders of the traitor Governatrice were burned alive,’ said High Chaplain Moktarn, the Kalidar army group’s spiritual leader. ‘Into these cages these men go now for a higher treason: they turned their back on the Emperor of Man, and so they shall face the same fate. But even in this moment of painful death, they can rest assured that their transgressions will be forgiven by our Lord, who sorrows to see any man turn away from the light of holy Terra.’
Grim-faced soldiers thrust lit torches into the stacked wood at the bases of the gibbets’ iron poles. Stacked faggots burst into violent fire, sped on by accelerant. Flames whooshed up. The face of the lord-civil squirmed as they licked at his feet.
He started screaming a moment later. Colonel Maden held his silence for half a minute, but even he could not bear such pain, and he too began to cry, awful, shrill shrieks of agony that went on far too long. The wood burned clean; there was no smoke to choke them. Only when black matter bubbled from their burning lips did they stop writhing and fall silent.
Bannick watched as the fire consumed the traitors, keeping his face impassive as expected, though he was horrified by what he saw. Maden had named himself and the lord-civil cowards. Bannick thought that a spiteful calumny forced on them by the victors. On the contrary, to surrender and accept such a fate, the lord-civil and the city commander must have been very brave men indeed.
Chapter Eight
Leave
MATUA SUPERIOR
GERATOMRO
083298.M41
Cities are robust organisms, unconcerned with the lives of the teeming creatures that make up their constituent parts. What is it to a city if one man dies, or ten thousand? The city persists. By the time night fell, the siege was already fading from Matua Superior’s forgetful memory. Businesses opened their doors wide to their conquerors, their owners hungry for trade, though they had little to sell. So it was that the crew of Cortein’s Honour found themselves wandering through the pleasure district of Matua Superior along with five thousand other men on short leave. The Departmento Munitorum had a system for rest and relaxation of its troops, as it had systems for everything. There were nearly a million men marshalling at the spaceport for the conquest of the world. Not all of them could take leave. Not all of them were worthy, by any means, and that was the first filter. Seventy thousand men had taken part in the landing. More filters were applied. Specialists and middle-ranking officers were denied leave, as were regimental arbitrators. Any man with a negative mark against his record was restricted to the port. Those with less than a year’s service were ineligible, ruling out the newest regiments, including all of Gollph’s countrymen.
The twenty-seven thousand men who were permitted rest were allotted two hours, thirty-six minutes of free time each, to be taken in groups according to strict rotation. Twenty minutes of this was taken up by a religious service, attendance compulsory, or remaining leave was to be forfeited. As soon as this was done, the men naturally headed out in search of bars and bawdy houses. There are few other things of interest to soldiers other than quick pleasures, especially to those who measure their lifespan in days.
To the Atraxian Leonates, the pleasure district was a shocking place. To the Paragonians it was disappointingly tame. Gollph – whom Bannick had ordered to accompany the others to get around his lack of leave – took it all in with amazement. For him, everything was equally strange and wonderful.
Kolios remained to pray to the tank. Bannick had an invitation to dine with his uncle, and the Savlar Shoam had gone off on his own. That left seven of them. Conquering heroes wandered the conquered city. Tensions between native and Militarum were lessening by the hour. The personal wealth of an average Astra Militarum trooper was small, but multiplied by their numbers, considerable sums of money were changing hands. The tankers were not challenged, only enticed by barkers with eager smiles shouting out the virtues of vice. Nor did they see much in the way of violence towards the fabric of the city or its inhabitants on the invaders’ part. To these veterans of the appalling fighting on Kalidar, the relative peacefulness of Matua Superior was surreal.
The streets were narrow, the evening sky a light-polluted orange bar crowded by soaring hab-blocks. Tavernae and refectoria occupied the ground floors of the buildings.
A churning ventilation fan pumped out the oily smoke of cooking flesh, and Ganlick made a face.
‘Ooh, that turns my stomach. I can still smell burned meat,’ he said.
‘You couldn’t smell nothing!’ said Meggen.
‘I could too – the air filter’s bust in the tertiary gunnery station intake. I could smell them. I smelt those lords burn.’ He stuck out his tongue. ‘I can still taste it.’ Then he burst out laughing cruelly. ‘Best way for traitors to go. Gives them time to think about what they did. Did you see the fat one jig?’
‘You smelt nothing, Ganlick,’ said Leonates grimly. ‘You are a crass man.’
‘Better to be crass than crisp,’ said Ganlick. Much of his morbidity was a defence mechanism; he was not cruel but he was already drunk. They had expected Kalligen to be the first to go, but he was a more hardened drinker than his comrade, swigging often from his bottle of liquor without any apparent effect.
‘And don’t go pulling any more tricks like what got you that booze,’ said Meggen. ‘Or you’ll end up on the end of a rope.’
‘This was a donation.’
‘There are better ways of getting your booze than thieving,’ said Kalligen.
‘You’d know,’ said Ganlick. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t thievi
ng!’
‘You practically snatched it out of his hand,’ said Epperaliant, breaking his silence. ‘Be careful, Ganlick.’ He pointed up.
The crew of Cortein’s Honour came to a halt before a pair of Savlar Chem-Dogs strung up on opposite sides of the street from lumen posts. Signs hung around their necks.
‘Looooters,’ read Gollph arduously. ‘They steal?’
‘Mm huh,’ said Kalligen, who took little notice of the corpses and was instead checking over the local tavernae. They had come upon a run of them, each one blinking neon signs to tempt in customers.
‘Commissars do it,’ said Meggen. ‘I don’t hold with stealing from the civilians, but fighting’s hard, men need an outlet. Sometimes they overstep the mark. A little flexibility’s needed.’
‘Something I’m sure Shoam would agree with,’ said Vaskigen.
‘They can’t help themselves, those Savlar,’ said Meggen. ‘You shouldn’t punish a loyal man for what he is. They fought hard on Kalidar, those boys, even if they are scum. Nobody’s perfect.’
‘Where is that slippery basdack Shoam anyway?’ said Vaskigen.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ said Ganlick. He shivered. ‘Come on, Kalligen, choose somewhere to drink for the sake of the Throne, I’m dying here. It’s freezing. Why is this planet so cold?’
‘Don’t you remember the long winter back home? This place is tropical, if you ask me,’ said Vaskigen.