[Imperial Guard 01] - Fifteen Hours

by Mitchel Scanlon - (ebook by Undead)

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  FIFTEEN HOURS

  Imperial Guard - 01

  Mitchel Scanlon

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  To Mom and Dad — Hey, look it, I done wrote my first book without pictures.

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants — and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  The sky was dark, and he knew he was dying.

  Alone and frightened, unable to stand or even move his legs, he lay on his back in the frozen mud of no-man’s land. Lay there helpless, his body shrouded in darkness, eyes gazing up at the nighttime sky overhead as though trying to read some portent of his future in the cold distant stars. Tonight, the stars kept their own counsel. Tonight, the bleak and foreboding heavens held no comfort.

  How long has it been now, he thought. How many hours?

  Finding no answer to his question, he turned his head to look out at the scenery about him — hoping at last to see some sign of rescue but there was nothing: no movement in the darkness, no cause for hope. Around him, the bleak expanses of no-man’s land lay still and silent. A landscape rendered featureless by the hand of night, painted black with threatening shadows, holding nothing that spoke to his hopes or could even help him to find his bearings. He was lost and alone, abandoned to a world of darkness, with no prospect of help or salvation. For a moment it seemed to him he might as well be the last man left alive in the entire galaxy. Then, the thought of it gave him cause for fear and he quickly put it from his mind.

  How long now, he thought again. How many hours?

  He had felt nothing when the bullet struck him. No pain, no agony, nor even anguish, just a strange and sudden numbness in his legs as he slid toward the ground. At first, not understanding what had happened, he had thought he had tripped. Until, cursing himself for his clumsiness, he had tried to rise only to find his legs curiously unresponsive. It was then, as he felt the spreading warmth of his own blood seeping across his belly, that he had realised his mistake.

  In the hours since, unable to see the extent of his wounds in the darkness, he had used his probing fingers to tell him what his eyes could not. He had been hit at the base of the spine, the bullet leaving a fist-sized hole at the front of his stomach as it exited his body. Treating his wounds to the best of his medical knowledge, he had stuffed them with gauze to stem the bleeding and placed dressings over them. Though there were phials of morphia in his Guard-issue med-pack and he had learned the “Prayer of Relief from Torment” by heart, he had no need for them. There was no pain from his wounds — even when his probing fingers had slid past the knuckle into the ragged hole in his stomach he had felt no physical discomfort. He did not need to be possessed of any great medical knowledge to know that was not a good sign.

  How long now, the question came to his mind again, unbidden. How many hours?

  There were other discomforts, though. The chill of the cold night air biting at the exposed skin of his face and neck, a terrible mind-wearying fatigue that made his thoughts seem dull and leaden: the fear, the loneliness, the isolation. Worst of all, there was the silence. When first he had fallen wounded, the night had thundered with all the cacophony of battle: the high-pitched whine of lasguns, the crack of slugthrowers, the roar of explosions, the screams and cries of the wounded and the dying. Sounds that gradually subsided, growing slowly more distant before finally giving way to silence. He would never have thought a man could draw comfort from such sounds. As terrifying as the clamour of battle had been, the quiet that followed was worse. It compounded his isolation, leaving him alone with all his fears. Here, in the darkness, fear had become his constant companion, plaguing his heart without remorse or respite.

  How long now? The question would not leave him. How many hours?

  At times, the compulsion came over him to cry out. To shout for help, to beg for mercy, to scream, to yell, to pray — anything to break that dreadful silence. Every time it came he fought it with all his strength, biting his lip hard to stop the words from spilling out. He knew that to make even the slightest sound would only be to bring death upon him all the sooner. For though his comrades might hear him, so would the enemy. Somewhere, out there on the other side of no-man’s land, the enemy waited in their countless millions. Waited, ever eager to fight, to maim, to kill. No matter how terrifying it was to be trapped alone and wounded in no-man’s land, the thought of being found by the enemy was worse. For what seemed like hours now, he had endured the silence. Knowing that, as desperately as he might hope for rescue, he could do nothing to speed it on its way towards him.

  How long now, the thought pounded insistently in his head. How many hours?

  There was so little left to him now. So little of real substance. All the things that had once meant so much — his family, his homeworld, his faith in the Emperor — now seemed dim and distant. Even his memories were insubstantial, as though his past was fading away before his eyes as swiftly as was his future. His inner world, the world of his life which had once seemed so full and bright with promise, had been diminished and reduced by circumstance. He was left with only a few simple choices: to cry out or keep his silence, to bleed to death or take his knife and end it quickly, to stay awake or fall asleep. At the moment, sleep seemed a tempting prospect. He was tired and bone-weary, fatigue pulling at his sluggish mind like an insistent friend, but he would not yield to it. He knew if he fell asleep now he would likely never awaken. Just as he knew that all these so-called choices were simply illusions. In the end, there was only one stark choice left to him now — to live or to die — and he refused to die.

  How long now, the question again, relentless. How many hours?

  But there was no answer. Resigning himself to the thought that his fate was now in the hands of others, he waited in the silence of no-man’s land. Waited, hoping that somewhere out in the night his comrades were already searching for him. Waited, refusing to give in or fall asleep. He waited, caught between life and death. His life a last fitful burning spark lost amid a sea of darkness, his mind wondering how it was he had ever come to be there at all…

  CHAPTER ONE

  20:14 hours Jumal IV Central Planetary Time

&n
bsp; (Western Summer Adjustment)

  The Last of a Thousand Sunsets — A Letter Edged in Black — A Ghost in the Cellar — The Lottery and the Tale of his Fathers

  The sun was setting, its slow descent reddening the vast reaches of the westward sky and bathing the endless wheat fields below it in shades of gold and amber as they stirred gently in the evening breeze. In his seventeen years of life to date, Arvin Larn had seen perhaps a thousand such sunsets, there was something about the beauty of this one that gave him pause. Enraptured, his chores for the moment forgotten, for the first time since his childhood he simply stood and watched the setting of die sun. Stood there, with the world still and peaceful all about him, gazing toward the gathering fall of night as he felt a nameless emotion rising deep within his heart.

  There will be other sunsets, he thought to himself. Other suns, though none of them will mean as much to me as this one does, here and now. Nothing could mean as much as this moment does, standing here among these wheat fields, watching the last sunset I will ever see at home.

  Home. The mere thought of the word was enough to make him turn his head and look over his shoulder across the swaying rows of ripening grain toward the small collection of farm buildings on the other side of the field behind him. He saw the old barn with its sloping, wood-shingled roof. He saw the round tower of the grain silo: the ginny-hen coops he had helped build with his father; the small stock pen where they kept the draft horses and a herd of half-a-dozen alpacas.

  Most of all, he saw the farmhouse where he had been born and raised. Two-storeyed, with a low wooden porch out front and the shutters on the windows left open to let in the last of the light. Given the unchanging routines of his family’s existence, Larn did not need to see inside to know what was happening within. His mother would be in the kitchen cooking the evening meal, his sisters helping her set the table, his father in the cellar workshop with his tools. Then, just as they did every night, once their chores were done the family would sit down at the table together and eat. Tomorrow night they would do the same again, the pattern of their lives repeating endlessly day after day, varying only with the changing of the seasons.

  It was a pattern that had endured here for as long as anyone could remember. A pattern that would continue so long as there was anyone left to farm these lands. Though, come tomorrow night at least, there would be one small difference.

  Come tomorrow, he would no longer be here to see it.

  Sighing, Larn returned to his work, turning once more to the task of trying to repair the ancient rust-pitted irrigation pump in front of him. Before the sunset had distracted him he had removed the outer access panel to reveal the inner workings of the pump’s motor. Now, in the fading light of twilight, he removed the motor’s burnt-out starter and replaced it with a new one, mindful to say a prayer to the machine spirit inside it as he tightened and re-checked the connections.

  Taking a spouted canister from beside the foot of the pump he dribbled a few drops of unguent from it into the workings. Then, satisfied everything was in order, he reached out for the large lever at the side and worked it slowly up and down a dozen times to prime the pump before pressing the ignition stud to start the motor. Abruptly, the pump shuddered into noisy life, the motor whining as it strained to pull water up from aquifers lying deep below the ground. For a moment, Larn congratulated himself on a job well done. Until, just as the first few muddy drops of water emerged from the mouth of the pump to stain the dry earth of the irrigation trench before it, the motor coughed and died.

  Disappointed, Larn pressed the ignition stud again. This time though, the motor stayed sullenly silent. Leaning forward, he carefully inspected the parts of the mechanism once more — checking the connections for corrosion, making sure the moving parts were well-lubricated and free from grit, searching for broken wires or worn components — all the things the mechanician-acolyte in Ferrusville had warned them about the last time the pump was serviced. Frustratingly, Larn could find nothing wrong. As far as he could see, the pump should be working.

  Finally, reluctantly forced to concede defeat, Larn lifted the discarded access panel and began to screw it into place once more. He had so badly wanted to be able to fix the pump, with harvest time still three weeks away, it was important the farm’s irrigation system should be in good working order. Granted, it had been a good season so far and the wheat was growing well but the life of a farmer was always enslaved to the weather. Without the irrigation system to fall back upon, a couple of dry weeks now could mean the difference between feast and famine for an entire year.

  But in the end he knew that was only part of it. Standing there, looking down at the pump after he had screwed the panel back in place, Larn realised his reasons for wanting to see it repaired went far beyond such practical considerations. Like it or not, tomorrow he would be leaving the farm forever and saying farewell to the only land and life he had ever known, never to return. He understood now that he had felt the need to perform some last act of service to those he would be leaving behind. He had wanted to complete some final labour on their behalf. An act of penance almost, to give closure to his grief.

  This morning, when his father had asked him to look at the pump and see if he could fix it, it had seemed the perfect opportunity to achieve that aim. Now though, the recalcitrant machine spirits inside the pump and his own lack of knowledge had conspired against him. No matter how hard he tried, the pump was broken beyond his powers to repair it and his last act of penance would go unfulfilled.

  Larn collected his tools together and made ready to turn for home, only to pause again as he noticed a change in the sunset. Ahead, the sun had already half disappeared below the horizon, while the sky around it had turned a deeper and more angry red. What gave him pause was not the sun or the sky, but the fields below them. Where once they had been bathed in spectacular shades of gold and amber, now the colour of the fields had become more uniform, changing to a dark and unsettling shade of brownish red, like the colour of blood. At the same time the evening breeze had risen almost imperceptibly, catching the rows of wheat in the fields and causing them to flow and shift before Larn’s eyes as though the fields themselves had become some vast and restless sea. It could almost be a sea of blood, he said to himself, the very thought of it causing him to shiver a little.

  A sea of blood.

  And, try as hard as he might, he could read no good omen in that sign.

  By the time Larn had put his tools away, the sun had all but set. Leaving the barn behind, he walked towards the farmhouse, the yellow glow of lamplight barely visible ahead of him through the slats of the wooden shutters now closed over the farmhouse windows. Stepping onto the porch Larn lifted the latch to the front door and walked inside, carefully removing his boots at the threshold so as not to track mud from the fields into the hallway. Then, leaving the boots just inside the doorway, he walked down the hall towards the kitchen, unconsciously making the sign of the aquila with his fingers as he passed the open door of the sitting room with its devotional picture of the Emperor hung over the fireplace.

  Reaching the kitchen he found it deserted, the smell of woodsmoke and the delicious aromas of all his favourite foods rising from the pans simmering on the stove. Roasted xorncob, boiled derna beans, alpaca stew and taysenbeny pie: together, the dishes of the last meal he would ever eat at home. Abruptly it occurred to him, in whatever years of his life might yet come, those selfsame aromas would forever now be linked with a feeling of desperate sadness.

  Ahead, the kitchen table was already laid out with plates and cutlery ready for the meal. As he stepped past the table toward the sink, he remembered returning from the fields two nights earlier to find his parents sitting in the kitchen waiting for him, the black-edged parchment of the induction notice lying mutely on the table between them. From the first it had been obvious they had both been crying, their eyes red and raw from grief. He had not needed to ask them the reason for their tears. Their expressions, and the Im
perial eagle embossed on the surface of the parchment, had said it all.

  Now, as he moved past the table Larn spotted the same parchment lying folded in half on top of one of the kitchen cupboards. Diverted from his original intentions, he walked towards it. Then, picking up the parchment and unfolding it, he found himself once more reading the words written there below the official masthead.

  Citizens of Jumael IV, the parchment read. Rejoice! In accordance with Imperial Law and the powers of his Office, your Governor has decreed two new regiments of the Imperial Guard are to be raised from among his people. Furthermore, he has ordered those conscripted to these new regiments are to be assembled with all due haste, so that they may begin their training without delay and take their place among the most Holy and Righteous armies of the Blessed Emperor of All Mankind.

  From there the parchment went on to list the names of those who had been conscripted, outlining the details of the mustering process and emphasising the penalties awaiting anyone who failed to report. Larn did not need to read the rest of it — in the last two days he had read the parchment so many times he knew the words by heart. Yet despite all that, as though unable to stop picking at the scab of a half-healed wound, he continued to read the words written on the parchment before him.

  “Arvin?” He heard his mother’s voice behind him, breaking his chain of thought. “You startled me, standing there like that. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  Turning, Larn saw his mother standing beside him, a jar of kuedin seeds in her hand and her eyes red with recently dried tears.

  “I just got here, Ma,” he said, feeling vaguely embarrassed as he put the parchment back where he had found it. “I finished my chores, and thought I should wash my hands before dinner.”