by Various
Instructor Gravenholm sat in the room, a thick file on the table in front of him. He was haloed in the light, as if he was a bureaucrat sorting through sins and virtues in the Emperor’s own court. Gravenholm was an old man, too old to live were it not for the juvenat machine sighing on the floor by his feet. Gravenholm was important enough for the Ordo Malleus to keep alive through arcane technology. Once, long ago, he had been a lowly trainee like Thorne. That was one of the thoughts that kept Thorne going.
‘Trainee,’ said Gravenholm, his words accompanied by the stuttering of the juvenat machine hooked up to his ancient lungs. ‘Speak your name.’
‘Explicator-Cadet Ascelan Thorne,’ replied Thorne, forcing the strength into his voice.
‘Good,’ said Gravenholm. ‘What process have you just undergone?’
Thorne swallowed. ‘Direct-pattern nerve stimulation.’
‘Why?’
‘Part of my training as an interrogator. We must resist interrogation techniques ourselves.’
‘I see.’ Gravenholm leafed through the file. ‘Prior to this process you were given data to memorise. Describe to me the content of that data.’
‘No.’
Gravenholm looked Thorne in the eye. ‘Tell me, Cadet Thorne.’
‘I will not do so.’
‘I see. That will be all.’
The orderlies returned to the room to wheel Thorne away. ‘Did I pass, sir?’ he said. The words came unbidden, blurted out. In reply Gravenholm merely gave him a last look, before turning a page in the file and starting to make notes with a quill.
The second time, Thorne was not ready.
He knew there had been nerve stimulation again. But there had been more, too. He had watched pict-grabs of destruction and death, cities burning, murders and mutilations spliced with images taken of himself doing things he couldn’t remember. In a dark room, men had screamed at him to confess his treachery with witches and aliens. He had woken up on an examining table with doctors describing the mutations they said he possessed. He did not know where the nerve stimulation ended and his own thoughts began.
He had seen Gravenholm many times. Perhaps it had been one of the pict-grabs, perhaps a nightmare. Perhaps he had actually been there. But now he was in the cube of light again, this time lying on a medical gurney with intravenous lines in the backs of his hands.
‘What is your name?’ asked Gravenholm.
Thorne coughed, and arched his back in pain. The nerve stimulation had been applied this time along his spine, and the points of pain remained where the probes had punctured between his vertebrae. ‘Thorne,’ he said. ‘Thorne. Explicator-cadet.’
‘I see. What processes have you undergone?’
‘I don’t... I’m not sure.’
Gravenholm made a few notes. He had not changed since the first bout of resistance training. The juvenat machine still did his breathing for him and his bald, lined face still tilted oddly so he could look over his spectacles at Thorne.
‘You were given data to remember. Tell it to me.’
‘No.’
Gravenholm made another note. ‘If you do not, further processes will be performed on you. They will include further nerve stimulation.’
‘No. I won’t tell you.’
‘I see.’
Thorne smiled. It was the first time he had done so in a long time. ‘I did well, right?’ he said. ‘I didn’t break. Have I done it? Will you make me an interrogator?’
Gravenholm didn’t bother to look up this time. He waved a hand, and the orderlies took Thorne away again.
The third time, Thorne barely recognised the room at all. The cube of light had been there before, but he did not know if it was in his mind or whether he had really been there. The inside of his mind was full of half-truths and random fragments. Faces loomed at him, and gloved hands holding medical implements. He saw hideous creatures, many-eyed beasts squatting in pits of rotting bodies and swarms of tiny things devouring his arms and body. He saw his hands become charred skeletal limbs and his face bloated and decaying in a mirror.
Maybe there had been nerve stimulation. Maybe not. Maybe a key word brought back the pain without any need for attaching the probes to his spine. It all ran together. There had been no passing of the days – just an infinite ribbon of time, a few loops illuminated in memory, most of it in darkness.
Thorne was again on the gurney. He had been lying on it for some time. His limbs were too weak to support him. Orderlies had to turn him onto his side so Gravenholm could speak to his face.
‘What is your name?’ said Gravenholm, the juvenat machine sighing in unison.
Thorne took a long time to answer.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Throne alive. Oh... merciful Emperor! I don’t know any more...’
Gravenholm smiled, made a final annotation, and closed the file.
‘Then you are ready,’ he said. ‘I have no use for an interrogator with his own personality. With his own name. Only when the vessel is empty can it be refilled with something the Ordo Malleus can use. Your training can begin, explicator-cadet. You shall be an interrogator.’
Alaric watched the interrogator at work through the one-way window that looked onto the explicator suite. Like the rest of the Obsidian Sky it was dressed with stone, more like the inside of a sepulchre than a spacecraft. The interrogator, wearing the plain uniform of an Ordo Malleus functionary, was speaking to Bulgor Hyrk. Hyrk was bracketed to the wall of the explicator suite, with his neck braced so his head did not loll on his useless neck. His spine was severed and his body paralysed, and it had been quick work by the ship’s medicae to save the heretic’s life when Alaric brought the dying body back to the Obsidian Sky.
‘Thorne is good,’ said Inquisitor Nyxos. The Obsidian Sky was Nyxos’s ship for the duration of the mission to capture Hyrk. He was an old, bleak-humoured man who seemed ancient enough to have seen everything the life of a daemon hunter could throw at him. He looked frail, but Alaric knew this was an illusion Nyxos cultivated with his bent body and ragged black robes. ‘He is already getting answers from Hyrk. Hyrk thinks his gods have abandoned him so he is telling all out of spite more than anything. Much of what he has told us is rather interesting.’
‘How so?’ said Alaric. He had spent many hours cleaning the filth off his armour and reconsecrating it, and now it gleamed in the dim light coming through the window.
‘It seems he took over the Merciless because he had somewhere to go in a hurry,’ replied Nyxos. ‘Nothing to do with the crew or the Imperial Navy. He just needed a spaceship. Everything he did to the crew was for his own amusement, as far as we can tell.’
‘Where was he going?’
‘To the Eye.’
Alaric shook his head. The Eye of Terror had opened and the forces of Chaos had poured through. Billions of Imperial Guardsmen and whole Chapters of Space Marines were fighting there to stem the tide, which threatened to break through into the Imperial heartlands of the Segmentum Solar. Heretics like Hyrk were flocking there, too, to pledge themselves to the cause of the Chaos lords.
‘Specifically,’ Nyxos was saying, ‘a planet named Sarthis Majoris. A call has gone out to filth like Hyrk and Throne knows how many have answered already. It seems that Hyrk was summoned by a creature there called Duke Venalitor. I have sent to the Eye for confirmation, but either way, I intend to see your squad reinforced and sent to Sarthis Majoris as soon as we have gotten everything we can out of Hyrk.’
‘I see. Could Hyrk be lying?’
‘Perhaps. But as I said, Thorne is really very good.’ Nyxos said this with a telling smile that told Alaric all he needed to know about what would happen to the paralysed Hyrk.
‘Look at this ship,’ said Alaric. ‘At the crew and the resources we have spent. How much did it take to put my squad on the Merciless? What sacrifices are made so we can do what we must do?’
‘Indeed, even I cannot count them all,’ said Nyxos. ‘We must take more from our Imperium
than any of us can understand. This thought troubles you?’
‘I can allow nothing to trouble me,’ said Alaric. ‘If we turn our thoughts to these things, we lose our focus. Our sense of duty is eroded. If our task is not worth sacrifice, then no task is.’
‘Good.’ Nyxos’s face darkened. ‘But speak not these thoughts too freely, Justicar. To some, they might sound like moral weakness. Like the thoughts of one who harbours doubt. Would that you were an inquisitor, Alaric, that you could speak freely and unveil the inquisitor’s seal to anyone who dared question you! But you are not.’
‘I know,’ said Alaric. ‘But someone must think of them. Otherwise, what are we? It is the Imperium we are supposed to be protecting, and yet it must suffer for our efforts to protect it. How far can we go before all become madness? Someone must watch over what we do.’
‘Leave that to us. And in the meantime, prepare your men. Sarthis Majoris will not be easy, and we are thin on the ground in the Eye. You and your squad will be on your own, whatever you might encounter there.’
‘I shall lead their prayers,’ said Alaric.
For a while after Nyxos left, Alaric watched Thorne work. Even without eyes, the expression on Hyrk’s face was that of a broken man.
It had taken untold sacrifices to break him. But Nyxos was right – that was a dangerous thing to think of. Alaric closed his eyes and meditated, and soon the thoughts were gone.
RED REWARD
Mitchel Scanlon
They had come upon the body by chance. Buried in frozen mud, it had been found by two Guardsmen as they hurried to resurrect the fallen wall of a firing trench in the lull between ork attacks. But for the man whose remains now lay at their feet there would be no such resurrection, only reburial in some less vigorously contested section of the city, with just a battered set of dog-tags to give name to the dead.
‘It’s Rakale, sergeant,’ Trooper Davir had said, standing over the body that was still half-concealed in the mud of the trench floor. ‘Or that’s what his tags say at least. Now his own mother wouldn’t recognise him.’
Even from the lip of the trench wall above them, Chelkar could see what Davir meant. Rakale’s face was only a memory now, his features reduced to a gruesome flattened smear marked with the striated imprint of the thing that had killed him.
‘It could only have been an ork tank,’ ventured the hulking Guardsman to Davir’s side. ‘An ork battle truck. Look, you can see the marks of its tracks on his face. Or what’s left of it. It must have rolled over the trench while Rakale lay underneath. Then the trench wall collapsed and the poor bastard was crushed. He would have seen it coming, too. A bad way to die.’
‘Bad way to die, my arse,’ Davir spat, flat ugly features alive with sudden anger. ‘You know a good way, Bulaven? We’re all poor bastards. And whether we die with throats cut, heads blown off, or crushed like Rakale here is beside the point. It‘s all the same in the end.’
‘Phh. If you feel that way about it, why don’t you end it all now, you stunted idiot?’ Bulaven rumbled back. ‘Put yourself out of all our miseries.’
‘Because, my fat friend, it is a well-known fact that the average ork couldn’t hit its own arse with both hands and a guided missile. While I – as you so charmingly put it – am a “stunted idiot”, a small target. One who confidently expects to outlive you all, I might add. Especially you, Bulaven. A blind man with a thrown rock and the palsy would be hard-pressed to miss your broad and capacious backside.’
‘Enough,’ Chelkar said, with just enough quiet force to let the squabbling pair know he meant it. ‘I want a four-man detail to move the body and bury it by the old plasteel works. Davir, Bulaven: you have both just volunteered. You may choose the others yourselves. And before I hear anyone complain about how hard the ground is, I want you to remember something: Rakale was one of our own.’
Without another word, two more Guardsmen jumped into the trench to join those already there. Then, with as much reverence as was practicable given the conditions, all four set about the delicate task of extricating Rakale’s remains from the mud. Occasionally a spade-head would strike a particularly hard-packed knot of earth, the impact shivering painfully up the handle to the hands of the digger. Then there might come a muffled curse, but for the most part they worked in silence. Four men, mindful of their duty to a fallen comrade and the code between all the defenders of this battle-scarred city: We bury our dead.
But by then Chelkar had already turned away to supervise repairs to another part of the company’s defences. The last attack had been a bad one. Twelve men dead – thirteen counting Rakale. And, with the remorseless logic of this place, Chelkar fully expected the next attack to be harder and more ferocious still. It was the way of things here. In the city of Broucheroc a man could rely on one thing at least: each new day would be worse than the last.
For a moment, casting tired eyes over the wearingly familiar landscape around him, Chelkar found himself distracted. Before him lay no-man’s-land: a great grey expanse of frozen mud and mounds of rubble, punctuated here and there by the fire-blackened silhouettes of dead ork vehicles. Behind him lay Broucheroc itself: an endless, seemingly all but abandoned cityscape of ruined and burned-out buildings. A ghost town, thought Chelkar, and we are its ghosts.
‘Sergeant?’
Turning, Chelkar saw Corporal Grishen hurrying towards him from the comms-dugout, four unfamiliar Guardsmen trailing in his wake like black-coated vultures. He did not need to see the crossed-swords-and-prayer-beads insignia at their collars to know who they were: Kessrian Guard. Or to know their arrival here could only mean trouble.
‘What is it, Grishen?’
Plainly discomfited, as though struggling to find the words, Grishen paused before answering. Behind him, the Kessrians stood in a rigid line with hellguns held at waist-level, safeties off. Though not normally given to nerves, Chelkar could not help but feel a certain unease to see the muzzles of their guns pointing his way.
‘We have received a message from Sector Command, sergeant,’ Grishen said, fidgeting as he spoke. ‘Well, two messages actually. The first is a communiqué forwarded from General Headquarters, a thought for the day, to improve the morale of the troops. The message reads: “It is better to die for the Emperor than to live for yourself”.’
‘I am sure the men will find that very comforting, Grishen,’ Chelkar said, doing his best to keep any trace of sarcasm from creeping into his voice. ‘And the second message?’
‘The second message is from Commissar Valk at Sector Command,’ Grishen replied, lowering his eyes as though suddenly noticing something of interest in the mud. ‘It instructs that you are to be disarmed and placed under arrest on charges of heresy and treason. These men have been sent to escort you to Sector Command for interrogation. And sergeant? They have orders to shoot to kill should you try to resist.’
Yes. The guns were pointed his way all right.
Here, in the rubble-strewn streets behind the front lines, amid the warrens of ruined tenements that once used to house the city’s workers, Chelkar could see some signs of life at least. No, life was too strong a word. There was movement: weary Guardsmen huddled round braziers for warmth, militia auxiliaries dispiritedly hauling supplies, even the occasional feral child hunting rats. But it was all no more than the last twitching spasms of a vast and dying corpse. Had every man, woman and child still alive in Broucheroc gathered in the central square, no one could have mistaken it for anything other than what it was. A gathering of the dead, like grimy-faced shades, who refused to face reality.
They were ghosts, these people. Ghosts with pulses perhaps, still able to love and laugh – even bear children – but ghosts just the same. They, and their city, lived only through some quirk of borrowed time. One day the big push would come and Broucheroc would fall. Then, whether by the orks or at their own leaders’ decree, these people would join all those who had gone to their deaths from this city before them. Although Chelkar was forced to
admit that even these ghosts probably had one advantage over him. They, at least, might live to see tomorrow.
His captors had stopped short of putting his legs in irons. That was something. But Chelkar knew better than to see it as any great cause for hope. It was a practical matter, they would have to walk to Sector Command. And, if his escorts did not want to carry him, his legs would need to be left unfettered.
Not his hands, though. There, the Kessrians had followed regulations to the letter. It was a new experience, walking these debris-choked alleyways with hands manacled behind him. Already he had suffered several bruisingly abrupt encounters with what the propagandists liked to call ‘the sacred ground of Broucheroc’. Enough to learn that the frozen soil was every bit as impregnable to the sudden impact of a human face as to the blade of an entrenching tool. But even the taste of his own blood, and the painful awareness that he had probably broken his nose three falls back, was not the worst of it.
Chelkar felt naked. He had been a Guardsmen seventeen years, the last ten spent bottled up in this damned city by the orks. Long enough to know there was no easier way to get killed than to be wandering around unarmed in the middle of a war zone. Your gun is your life; lose one and you’ll soon lose the other. It was a lesson every Guardsman lived or died by. A lesson Chelkar had learned as a snot-nosed recruit on his first day of training, courtesy of a kick up the arse from his drill instructor’s boot by way of emphasis. A kick that had probably saved his life a hundred times since. In the last seventeen years, whether he ate, slept, washed – even in the latrines – his shotgun, hellpistol and knife had been his constant companions. Now, without them, Chelkar knew what it was to lose a limb. He felt a sense of incompleteness, a phantom itch, impossible to scratch.