Arvo grunted. He had poured his water ration into his bowl and was bathing his head wound with it. Once he was done, he put the bowl to his lips and drained it.
‘You saw how everyone was starting to panic and you had to do something to stop it. If you hadn’t, things could’ve been much worse. People could have been trampled and… that man probably did something to deserve it, anyway.’
One life for many more; it seemed a reasonable equation, at least to those who knew how capricious death – and the will of the Emperor – could be.
‘They’re saying that a group of cultists hid in the shelter in Sector Eta-Two-something,’ Zanne whispered. ‘During the night they took out their knives and they went around slitting the throats of–’
Arvo placed a hand on Zanne’s. ‘Fetch your blanket,’ he said gruffly. Crowded though the chapel was, there was some space around him. No one wanted to get too close.
The girl’s face lit up. She hurried off to do as she was told. By the time she returned, Arvo was asleep.
In his dream he was on the ground; paralysed, helpless, as soldiers in skull masks were being blasted to pieces around him. He knew he shouldn’t care. For every one that died two more appeared to replace him, there was no stopping them – yet somehow, in the garbled world of the dream, every skull-masked soldier was him.
The dream disturbed him, yet oddly it brought him comfort too. When the waking bells wrenched him back to consciousness and he remembered where he was, a knot tightened in the pit of his stomach.
The dream, at least, had been of a familiar world. He had known his place there, known his duty and there had been others, many millions of others, like him. In the waking world, this world at peace, Arvo found himself lost.
Overseers were on the move, encouraging the slow-to-rouse. Arvo located Zanne and nudged her with his toe, sparing her the lash. ‘Stay close to me today,’ he whispered. He could already hear the clatters of ladles, depositing grey slop in tin bowls. He couldn’t tarry if he wished to eat. There was rarely enough for everyone.
Artificial hive light streamed through the broken windows, catching shards of coloured glass and diffusing into rainbows. Another day stretched out ahead of Arvo. Another long, hard workday. It wasn’t the work that made him feel weary, however.
Arvo was wearied by the effort of pretending to be an ordinary Imperial citizen – when he hardly knew what that meant.
‘Attention, all citizens.’
The voice blared out from vox speakers across the sector. Everyone was expected to heed its words without pausing in their labours.
It occurred to Zanne that, after all the devastation, the speakers had been the first things restored, which was only right of course. Communication was vital and the morning bulletins delivered good news to lift the spirits. Today, for example, there had been a great victory on Orath, as the Emperor’s Angels descended from the skies to cleanse that world of pestilence.
There was also a warning about diehard cultist cells in hiding across Hive Opus. ‘A spy was uncovered in a refuge only last night, scheming to sabotage our reconstruction efforts. It was by the Emperor’s grace and through the vigilance of ordinary citizens such as yourselves that his vile plot was foiled.’
Zanne had no shovel today, having been late in line for tools. She had to dig with her hands, which was no excuse for slacking. Private Renne was overseeing. He was a little more mindful of Zanne’s young age than most. He let her take water to the other labourers, so they could drink without leaving their posts.
She found Arvo kneeling, cradling something in his lap. He had laid down his axe. Zanne crouched beside him, concerned that he might be hurt, and saw what he was holding. It was a mask; a gas mask with a hole for a rebreather tube. One of its round eyepieces had been shattered and the cloth was stiff with dried blood.
Arvo had half uncovered a fallen man. Zanne had noticed the body, but paid it no heed – it was just one of many, very many. It seemed to have affected her friend, however.
The dead man’s right eye was a mess. Zanne recognised a bullet wound by now, and knew it would have been instantly fatal. Arvo must have peeled the gas mask from the corpse. What was it about this one in particular that had made his eyes glaze over?
‘Did you know him?’ she asked.
Arvo hesitated. ‘In a way,’ he confessed.
‘He isn’t wearing anything.’
‘The quartermasters must have reached him before he was buried.’
She frowned at the unfamiliar word. ‘Quartermasters?’
‘They salvaged his weapon, his armour, his equipment.’ Arvo turned the mask over in his hands. ‘They only left this behind because it is broken beyond repair. It served its purpose and is useless to them now. Just like its owner.’
‘Who was he?’ asked Zanne.
‘One of our liberators.’
‘The Astra Militarum?’ Zanne had thought she’d never seen an Imperial Guardsman before. She now realised that she had seen plenty in recent days. She had just never seen one alive. Much had been rumoured about the implacable, faceless soldiers of the Death Korps of Krieg. Bereft of their fearsome armour they looked like anyone else, any casualty of war.
Why did Orath merit Angels when Parius had to make do with ordinary men?
‘Praise the Emperor for their sacrifice,’ she said, mimicking the morning bulletins.
‘They are bred to fight and to die for Him,’ Arvo murmured. ‘They believe their lives are worth less than other lives. This man had nothing but his duty. He was glad to take a bullet in the eye, so that we could… We could…’
‘We could be free,’ said Zanne.
‘Yes,’ said Arvo dully. ‘So we could be free.’
They had rested too long. A whip servitor sprang up behind them, the muscles in its overdeveloped shoulders cording. The lash that replaced its right arm struck at Arvo’s back, crackling with a mild electric charge for good measure.
Arvo accepted his punishment with hardly a wince. He dropped the blood-encrusted mask and retook his pickaxe. Only Zanne heard the bitter words he muttered to himself as he resumed his toil with redoubled efforts: ‘So we could be free.’
They achieved a breakthrough later that afternoon.
The labourers cleared a way into a storage cellar. Private Renne shone a luminator down there and announced that it appeared intact. He sent a dozen labourers down into the darkness at once. Zanne would gladly have been one of them and was small enough to fit. Arvo held her back with a shake of his head.
For the next few hours, bulging grain sacks were hauled up from the cellar, passed along a line of workers, loaded into waiting trucks. One boy was whipped insensate when a sack tore in his arms, disgorging its load. Zanne was among those who had to kneel and claw back what they could from the dirt.
They worked an extra hour, so flushed was Renne with their success.
By the end of it, the cellar was almost picked clean. Then, a woman in the entranceway lost her footing with a full sack in her hands. Her flailing hand snatched at a creaking, groaning rafter for support – and the whole world shifted.
A terrible roar pierced Zanne’s ears. She thought they might be bleeding. She found herself hugging the ground, choking on black dust, blinded by tears. She came to realise only gradually that the shaking had stopped. As her eardrums cleared, she heard coughs and splutters, wails of pain and cracked, feeble cries for help.
Zanne’s first thought was to get back to work before a servitor saw her. She made it to her knees before doubling over, hacking up dust and bile. There were bodies strewn about her. Some were twitching, some ominously still. Others struggled to escape from beneath fresh mounds of wreckage.
‘It’s all right.’ She heard a familiar voice in her ear. A strong arm encircled her shoulders. ‘It’s over. You’re safe.’ Arvo had produced a beaker of water from so
mewhere – probably his own ration. She accepted it gratefully.
‘All those p-people,’ Zanne stammered, trembling with shock.
Arvo shook his head. ‘We can do nothing for them.’
‘You stopped me going down there. You knew the cellar was unsafe. You could have… Why didn’t you say something?’
‘The overseers saw what I saw,’ Arvo assured her. ‘They knew what I knew. It is not for us to question their decisions.’
The weary trudge back to the shelter that night was made under a heavier pall of silence than usual. As the workers filed through the chapel doors, Private Renne joined a small group of his comrades outside. He boasted to them about his successful day, about the amount of food he had recovered.
Inside the chapel, there was no sign of extra food, just fewer mouths to eat it. What little gruel remained was lukewarm, starting to congeal. Zanne was too tired to feel hungry anyway. She went straight to bed. Despite her gang’s extended shift today, work would resume exactly on schedule tomorrow.
‘I heard something today,’ said Zanne. ‘From someone at the refuge. His labour gang found another soldier, a Death Korps of Krieg-er. Alive.’
Arvo shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’ protested Zanne, although she had in fact been lying.
‘The quartermasters count every Korpsman back into the dropships.’
‘But what if–?’
‘Only the dead are left behind – or the missing, presumed dead.’
‘Yes, but what if one of the–?’
‘A survivor would make himself known to the planetary authorities and arrange return to his company as soon as possible, else be a deserter.’
They were tramping through the streets of the hive. Their gang was being herded to its new assignment, which was further away than the old one. This gave them half an hour’s respite each morning before the real work started. Zanne liked that the overseers tolerated some talking, as long as their charges walked.
‘What would happen, then?’ she asked. ‘To a deserter?’
He didn’t answer. Zanne studied his face for a clue to what he was thinking, but found none. ‘You said,’ she prompted him, ‘that the Kriegers were bred. To be soldiers?’
‘For a Korpsman to disobey orders,’ Arvo murmured, so she had to strain to hear him, ‘it is unknown, inconceivable. His conditioning… Unless…’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless the Korpsman himself was… deficient. Or touched by Chaos.’
At the sound of the word, Zanne made the protective sign of the aquila across her chest. ‘They must be frightened, sometimes, even soldiers.’
‘We are taught not to question. We are taught that the Emperor has all the answers, even when we are blind to them. We are taught that to think forbidden thoughts is a sign of insanity, but how… How can we know for sure?’
‘If I had to be shot at and blown up every day and had to face all kinds of monsters, I think I’d be frightened.’
‘Not frightened,’ Arvo muttered. ‘Never frightened.’
He wouldn’t be drawn further on the subject.
He didn’t speak again until later that afternoon. They were clearing the site of a demolished hab-block, to allow a new one to be erected. They had overfilled a waste disposal cart, which Arvo had to wheel to the incinerators. Zanne went along, a volunteer, to steady his load and to shovel up the debris that sloughed from it.
‘What will you do?’ Arvo asked her unexpectedly.
She frowned. ‘When? What do you mean?’
‘Once the reconstruction is complete. What did you do before?’
Zanne laughed at him. ‘There was no “before.”’ Seeing Arvo’s brow furrow, she tried to explain. ‘There is always rebuilding to do. We build, the traitors and the monsters come along and knock everything down, and we have to build again.’
‘Then this, the labour gangs, this is all there is?’
They were standing at the furnace mouth. Its breath seared the side of Zanne’s face and cast her friend in a fiery orange glow. ‘We serve the Emperor if we build faster than our enemies destroy.’ She was reciting old words again, words she had learned in her schola. ‘When we build more than we need on Parius, we can send metal and chemicals to the Emperor’s forges and men to fight for Him.’
‘Then what…?’ Arvo thought better of the question and stifled it.
He turned away, applying himself to the emptying of the cart. Zanne had to prompt him twice before he looked at her again.
‘What are those men fighting for?’ he asked in a deathly whisper.
His eyes demanded an answer, but she had none to give. Instead, to fill the uncomfortable silence, Zanne blurted out, ‘I knew him. He was our neighbour, back in the old hab-block. He used to come around and fix our lumoglobes when they… I thought I should tell you, that’s all.’
Arvo didn’t move, didn’t speak. Zanne wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. There was no taking back the words, however. Not now she had finally released them. She couldn’t bottle her secret up again.
‘I knew the real Arvo,’ she confessed.
Arvo returned to the shelter that night to find Zanne’s blanket gone.
She had moved it as far away from him as she could. She avoided him at work too, though he kept an eye on her as much as possible. Only three days later did he find – and take – a chance to speak to her again.
Zanne looked tired. She had been lashed three times already. She was beginning to sag again, and whip servitors were circling. Arvo took water over to her. Zanne smiled weakly through the sheen of dirt that covered her round face. She was shivering. He felt her forehead. It was hot and his hand came away damp.
She let him help her dig, until the servitors turned their gazes elsewhere.
‘He was dead when I found him,’ he muttered to her. ‘I did not kill him.’
Zanne gaped at him. ‘Of course not. I never thought–’
He knew now why she alone had talked to him, why she had been so curious. He owed her an explanation. For three days, he had striven to formulate one.
‘I woke and I was alone,’ he began, interrupting her. ‘I found his body, Arvo’s body, and I… It may have been the blow to my head, but… I wondered why his life, your lives, were worth more than our lives. I wondered what you had that was so precious, worth the sacrifice of so many of my brothers.’
‘You thought too many questions.’
Arvo nodded. ‘Yes. I did. I wanted to understand.’
‘I…’ began Zanne. She swallowed, averting her eyes from him. ‘I have questions sometimes, too. Just in my mind, but…’
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Sometimes, in the block, I’d hear people saying, “why can’t we have more food and longer rest hours?” I should have reported them as traitors, but I didn’t. I knew they had alcohol. They were making it on the thirty-fourth floor. Then there was graffiti in the stairwells and the next thing anyone knew–’
‘Everything fell apart,’ muttered Arvo.
‘So, do you?’ asked Zanne with disarming directness. ‘Do you understand?’
Arvo’s brow creased. He took a breath.
A sudden eruption of noise forestalled him. Familiar noise, the soundtrack of his old life. At first he thought it was in his head, another memory. Gunfire and voices raised in anger, fear and pain – and explosions. He could see from Zanne’s face that she heard it too. In the distance, but rapidly approaching: the sound of war.
Arvo reached by reflex for a gun that wasn’t there. He clung to the haft of his pickaxe instead, rising from his crouch.
Most of the overseers had also drawn weapons and were headed towards the disturbance. Their leader, Corporal Maxtell, remained. ‘Ignore it,’ he barked at his nervous labourers, spraying spittle. ‘Whatever is happe
ning is no business of yours and no excuse for shirking. This gang will meet its end-of-shift quotas or I’ll take the difference out of your hides!’
‘Sir, I can help,’ Arvo spoke up. ‘I–’
He felt Zanne’s elbow in his ribs and bit his tongue. She was right. It would be unwise to reveal his secret. A glowering servitor was pushing its way towards him. He did as he was told and returned to work – though not for long.
The war, with all its noise and fury, crashed into them.
It began with a single running figure, spitting profanities over his shoulder. A black-and-purple cultist’s cloak was slung over his grey labourer’s coveralls. Maxtell fired. He missed, but a lasgun beam from behind blew out the traitor’s knee. He fell in a spray of bone fragments and blood to lie in gasping, twitching agony.
The corporal bowed to the inevitable, yelling to his gang to retreat but keep hold of their tools. Arvo kept a tight grip on his axe. More cultists burst onto the scene, and he stepped to greet them. Not expecting resistance from a simple labourer, they ran into his bludgeoning attack.
They were everywhere, suddenly, stinking shadows emerging from the half-light, seeking human shields to hide behind. One made a grab for Zanne and earned Arvo’s pick through his skull.
Muzzles flashed. Arvo saw Maxtell cut down as he dived for cover. He pulled Zanne down behind a half-demolished wall. One of the gang’s lumen units was shot out, followed swiftly by the other.
Parius Interior Guard troops, including some of Arvo’s overseers, were hard on the cultists’ heels. Their lasgun and luminator beams criss-crossed in the darkness. Voices yelled to the labourers to flatten themselves on their stomachs, but many were held captive or just too panicked to comply. The soldiers, having given fair warning, were not reticent about shooting any shadow that moved.
Zanne had curled into a trembling ball.
‘There are only a few of them,’ Arvo whispered to her reassuringly. ‘A dozen, at most. This is not a planned attack. They have been smoked out of some bolthole and are on the defensive.’
They’re doing as much damage as they can, he could have added but chose not to, one last howl of rage before they die. He recalled what Zanne had said: We build, the traitors and the monsters come along and knock everything down, and we have to build again.
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