by Steve Lyons
Arex’s elegant blue dress had suffered similarly, and Gunthar saw that she was no longer wearing her red amecyte necklace, her mother’s last gift to her. He didn’t know if she had concealed it herself, or if it had been snatched from her.
They were drawing level with the soldiers now. Gunthar could feel their sharp eyes upon him, scanning him for lesions, moles or anything else that might mark him out as abnormal just as he had been scanning the people around him. He must have passed their inspection, because a moment later he and Arex were past the soldiers and the ARV, on the outside – the safe side, the free side – of their tightening cordon.
Gunthar didn’t know what to do, at first. He wasn’t alone in this. There were many more escapees milling about, some laughing, some weeping, some wandering dazed or just sitting at the kerbside, shaking their heads. There were spectators too, those who hadn’t been involved in the incident but who had seen the soldiers and were hungry for scandal. Gunthar heard snatches of conversation, and discerned that few of the people here had actually seen a mutant. They were shaken all the same, reflecting upon their imagined close calls, starting rumours that would grow with each retelling.
Arex was leading Gunthar through all this, and he saw that, unlike him, she had a purpose in mind. They waited until they had cleared the worst of the crowd, until there were no soldiers watching them. Then she took his hand again, and they ran.
They ran as hard and as fast as they could away from that place.
They came to rest in a dark alleyway, and Gunthar – who had thought their flight to be aimless – was surprised to find that this was exactly where Arex wanted to be.
A rusted fire escape ladder snaked its way up a crumbling brick wall, and he sagged against it. His legs felt weak and his lungs were heaving for air. He was shaking.
Arex was drained too, and neither of them spoke nor met each other’s eyes for what seemed like forever. Then she said, in a dulled voice, ‘I should go. Uncle Hanrik will be wondering where I’ve got to. Sometimes he sends the proctors out to look for me.’
She swung herself onto the bottom rung of the ladder. Gunthar looked up, but he couldn’t see its top. It was swallowed by the darkness.
‘I should come with you,’ he said reluctantly. ‘A little further, at least.’
‘There’s no need,’ said Arex. ‘Really, there’s no need. There’s a heavy goods lifter on the roof up here that will take me most of the way.’
‘If it’s working,’ said Gunthar.
‘I checked the maintenance reports before I came out. You should be getting home too. Can you find your way back, around the PDF cordon?’
‘Of course I can,’ said Gunthar, not at all certain that he could.
Arex turned to leave again, and Gunthar’s heart gave a frightened leap. He wasn’t ready to see her go just yet. He couldn’t be alone. ‘I’m sorry,’ he blurted out.
She froze with one foot on the ladder, a hand clutching at a higher rung.
‘I should have protected you,’ he said. ‘I should have done something.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Arex. ‘What could you have done?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Something more than just… I was useless back there. I could see what I was meant to do, I just couldn’t… I couldn’t do it.’
Arex stepped off the ladder, took his head in her hands, and gently brushed a curl of dark hair out of his face. ‘Look what happened to the men who tried to fight.’
‘It’s just, I always thought, in a situation like that, I would…’
‘You did the right thing, Gunthar. You got us out of there.’
‘I applied to join the PDF, you know, a few years back. I was seventeen. My friends had been drafted, and they left me behind. I thought, at least I could fight for the Emperor at home. They turned me down. They must have known…’
‘If it was anyone’s fault, what happened,’ said Arex, ‘it was mine.’
‘No.’
‘I’m the one who brought us both down here.’
‘But you couldn’t have expected… I mean, mutants, this many floors up!’
‘It happens,’ said Arex, ‘more often than you might think, and this time… Didn’t you wonder how the PDF got here so quickly, in such numbers?’
Gunthar frowned. ‘You think they…?’
‘I think they were patrolling these skyways. I think they were expecting trouble. I told you, Gunthar, I heard Uncle Hanrik talking about… well, I don’t know what, but I think there’s something wrong. Something… something below. And if that “something” is driving the mutants up here…’
They looked at each other, and Gunthar could see the same thoughts, the same fears, reflected in Arex’s eyes that were whirling about in his own head.
‘They think,’ she said softly, at last, ‘Uncle Hanrik and the rest of them, they think that what happens down here, it doesn’t affect us – but it has to, one day.’
‘Will I see you again?’ asked Gunthar.
Arex smiled. ‘Of course you will. Soon. I’ll contact you.’ She leaned in close, slid her hands around to the back of his head, and before he knew it their lips had met and he was melting into her kiss, breathing in her blossom-scented perfume, feeling her warmth in his arms.
It ended too soon. Arex broke away, and she was climbing the ladder again, out of Gunthar’s life, and this time he knew he couldn’t call her back because this time there was nothing left to say. Nothing, he realised, but the most important thing, and he had left it too late now to say that.
He should have given her the amecyte ring.
Chapter Two
Hieronymous Theta.
An obscure world, located near the outer rim of the Segmentum Tempestus.
A relatively new world, Commissar Costellin noted. Its population still hovered just below the nine billion mark, and a third of its surface had yet to be built over.
Like many new worlds, Hieronymous Theta was still rich in mineral deposits. Its major industries were based around the extraction and working of those minerals. The planet paid a good proportion of its tithe to the Emperor in adamantium and plasteel.
Hieronymous Theta was a sheltered world, the Imperium maintaining a strong grip on the systems around it. Thumbing his way through the data-slate in his hands, Costellin saw that neither the world nor its closest neighbours had been touched by the smallest recorded conflict. It was perfect, he thought.
‘Will that be all, sir?’
Costellin looked up, surprised. He thought he had dismissed the Guardsman who had brought in the slate. He recalled that, in fact, he had only made a dismissive motion with his hand as he had settled into his reading. He ought to have known better.
Costellin had spent almost thirty years – since he was a young man, barely out of his thirties – assigned to the Death Korps of Krieg. If he had learned one thing in those years, it was that Death Korps soldiers, on the whole, could not take hints. They didn’t respond to body language or moods. They needed explicit orders.
The Guardsman stood rigidly in front of the commissar’s broad desk. Even here, in the controlled environment of the troop ship, he wore full combat dress. His greatcoat, trousers and boots were charcoal grey, the colour of the Krieg 186th Infantry Regiment – although, as few Death Korps regiments chose any colour other than grey or black, this didn’t exactly distinguish them from the crowd.
The Guardsman’s helmet, gloves and backpack were all in place. His lasgun was slung at his side. Most egregiously of all, he still wore his full facemask. A length of thick rubber tubing connected its mouthpiece to a rebreather unit in a square, leather carrying case resting against his chest.
Costellin didn’t know the name of this particular soldier. He didn’t know the names of any of them. Only a few Krieg men had names, and it was not common practice within the regiment to use them. On paper, they were just numbers to him – as indeed they were to the colonels and the generals who deployed them in battle.
Krieg had been classified a deathworld, its atmosphere toxic. Costellin understood that, as a consequence, its people wore their filtration systems as they wore their skins. Despite this, before his transfer to a Krieg regiment, he had imagined the masks would have to come off some time. He had been wrong.
The masks distanced their wearers, even from each other. In contrast to the other regiments with which Costellin had served, he had seen few strong bonds formed among Death Korps men. They trained, fought, ate, slept alongside each other, but there was no friendship, not a trace of camaraderie, between them. This was a regiment of strangers – and, as the years had gone by, Costellin had come to suspect that this might just have been the point.
‘Yes, yes, that’s all,’ he said, waving the nameless, faceless soldier away from him again. The Guardsman saluted, pivoted on his heel and made for the door.
‘I was wondering,’ said Costellin, halting him in his tracks, ‘how many of your platoon might be going planetside. I did circulate a memo. It’s just that we have four regiments aboard this ship. It might be polite to give the Hieronymous authorities some warning if we are about to descend upon them in force.’
The Guardsman stared silently at him, for a moment longer than Costellin felt entirely comfortable with. The round, dark eyepieces in his mask shielded his thoughts and lent him an eerie, hollow-eyed look.
‘We will be staying aboard the Memento Mori, sir,’ he said. ‘We have a schedule of combat exercises planned for the next six days.’
‘We’re all entitled to time off, Guardsman,’ said Costellin. ‘In fact, we’re a good way overdue, having stayed with the campaign on Dask as long as we did. The Administratum has gone to a great deal of trouble to arrange this layover.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I am sure that, whatever exercises your lieutenant has planned for you, they are voluntary.’
‘Yes, sir. We all volunteered, sir.’
‘Of course you did,’ said Costellin with a sigh. After all this time, he didn’t know why he had even bothered to ask. In this case, it had probably been out of embarrassment; his brain had been racing to come up with a reason for having kept the man waiting as long as he had.
‘One more thing,’ he remembered, ‘as long as you’re here. You can convey my congratulations to Major Gamma on his recent promotion. Tell him I’ll catch up with him as soon as I return, and we can go through the new troop allocations then.’
‘Major Gamma, sir?’
‘I mean, Colonel 186,’ Costellin corrected himself. ‘Although, while you’re at it, you should probably congratulate Major Gamma – the new Major Gamma – too.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Costellin knew he should have delivered the messages in person, but for once, he thought, his duty could wait. It wasn’t as if the gesture would have been appreciated – and, as of 06.00 this morning, he was officially on leave.
He returned his attention to the data-slate, but caught himself a moment later and looked up to find the Guardsman still standing to attention in the doorway.
‘Thank you, that’s all,’ said Costellin. ‘Dismissed.’
The Guardsman saluted again, and the door slid shut in front of him.
Costellin suppressed a small shudder. He didn’t know where it had come from. After all, he should have been used to dealing with the Death Korps by now. Sometimes, though, he found they still got to him – their lack of visible expression, of discernible emotion, of the smallest trace of empathic feeling.
He put such thoughts from his mind. He skimmed the rest of the slate, absorbing more details about Hieronymous Theta. Its capital, Hieronymous City, was currently enjoying a temperate autumn. Rainfall this year had been below average.
Not that the weather mattered much to him. Costellin intended to spend his six days’ leave indoors, in bars, in restaurants, in entertainment venues, revelling in the long-denied pleasure of simple human contact.
And the best thing by far, if he knew his regiment at all, was that there wouldn’t be a single member of the Death Korps of Krieg within thirty thousand kilometres of him.
Costellin felt the deck plates trembling beneath his feet.
He moved to the side of the corridor as a Death Korps platoon rounded the bend ahead of him. They had formed up in threes and were doing circuits, their heavy boots falling perfectly in step so the entire ship seemed to ring with each impact. The watchmaster at their head ordered them to ‘eyes left’, and threw a crisp salute in the commissar’s direction. Costellin returned it, and waited patiently for the remainder of the platoon to pass him by.
Sixty pairs of those hollow, dark eyes, fixing him with their blank stares.
Sometimes, Costellin wondered what they saw when they looked at him: a silver-haired, beak-nosed old man who had lived to an age few of them would see.
Through a concave window, he looked down onto a cargo deck. Another platoon had cleared themselves a small training space, by stacking wooden crates precariously against the wall. They were clad in black, so must have belonged to the 42nd or the 81st, he couldn’t see their shoulder flashes from here to tell which.
The Guardsmen were bayoneting sandbags, onto which, curiously, images of their own kind had been stencilled. Costellin had once questioned a watchmaster about this, to be told in a dull but self-assured monotone that the greatest potential threat to any army came from within its own ranks. The Memento Mori was equipped with a proper gymnasium and a firing range, but Costellin didn’t doubt that both of these would be in use, and booked up solid for the next six days.
In contrast, the wardroom was empty but for one other commissar: a balding man with sagging jowls whom Costellin had not seen before. The Krieg officers tended to eat with the lower ranks, having risen through those ranks themselves.
Costellin picked up his meal from the hatch and, because he felt he should, took a seat across from his opposite number. He introduced himself, and learned in return that the other commissar’s name was Mannheim, freshly posted to the Krieg 42nd.
Of course, Costellin knew what the subject of their conversation would be.
‘I was only on Dask for a month and a half,’ said Mannheim, ‘I only saw the final stages of the campaign there, but I can tell you this much – the resolve, the sheer grit I saw displayed by those men…’
‘But?’ Costellin prompted. He knew there would be a ‘but’.
‘You must have served with other regiments before you came to this one,’ Mannheim said guardedly.
Costellin nodded. ‘The Catachan Fourteenth.’
‘Jungle Fighters.’ Mannheim was impressed. ‘I’ve heard they can be difficult.’
‘Not especially,’ said Costellin casually, ‘if you know how to deal with them. I earned their respect and their trust, and they more than earned mine. The Death Korps remind me of them, in some ways. They fight as hard, and are just as unshakeable. You know, the combined Krieg regiments have the lowest desertion rate in the Imperial Guard. It’s as near as damn it to zero.’
‘They certainly aren’t afraid of dying,’ said Mannheim, mumbling thoughtfully through a mouthful of food.
‘In the right cause, no.’
‘And don’t get me wrong, they are perfectly respectful. When I give them an order, they jump to it.’
‘You just don’t know how to relate to them,’ Costellin guessed.
‘When I talk to them, it’s like… I get nothing back from them. I can’t tell what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling. What is it that drives them, Costellin?’
Costellin smiled tightly. He had asked himself that question more times than he could count. He hadn’t yet found the answer, not completely.
The men of Krieg didn’t discuss their past – to them, it was a source of shame – but, three decades ago, Costellin had made it his business to learn all he could about his new regiment, and this had included their history.
It had been a sur
prisingly arduous task. Much of what had been written about Krieg and its people had been lost – in some cases, he suspected, deliberately expunged – from Imperial records. One single, dreadful fact, however, was beyond doubt.
Barely a millennium and a half ago, Krieg had been lain waste by the bloodiest and most brutal civil war ever known to mankind.
It began, Costellin explained to Mannheim, when the corrupt and decadent Autocrats who ruled the planet declared themselves independent from the Imperium. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the citizens were outraged by this heresy.’
‘Of course,’ said Mannheim.
‘So, the Autocrats sent their private armies out into the streets to crush any and all resistance. They almost succeeded.’
The man credited with the salvation of Krieg was one Colonel Jurten. When the Autocrats made their move, Jurten had been in the hive city of Ferrograd, mustering a single Imperial Guard regiment. He had acted quickly, seizing control of that city, turning it into a rallying point for the resistance movement.
Of course, Jurten and his brave men had been outnumbered thousands to one – and their enemies had had far greater resources than they, including control of the planetary defences. The Imperium couldn’t get a force through the Autocrats’ blockade to help the struggling Krieg loyalists. Jurten was fighting a war he couldn’t win – at least, not through conventional means. Then, buried beneath the Ferrograd hive, in a secret vault constructed by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the colonel had found a cache of forbidden weapons, antique devices of death, that were anything but conventional.
‘The greatest hero in Krieg’s history,’ said Costellin, ‘is the man who destroyed it. Jurten decided that, if the Emperor couldn’t have his world, then nobody could. On the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, he detonated those missiles in the atmosphere.’
Mannheim had forgotten his food. Pink sludge dribbled off the edge of his spoon. ‘Then that… that’s why the air on Krieg is…?’
‘The missiles destroyed the ecosystem,’ Costellin confirmed. ‘Jurten killed billions of his own people, but he also evened the odds against him. The war raged on for another five hundred years, but at last the victors emerged.’