Astra Militarum Read online

  My right arm.

  I twisted in the chains, snarling, transmuting the pain into rage. I cast about with my remaining eye, taking in my surroundings as I sought what had been taken from me. I was in a large metal chamber. It was about a dozen metres on a side, and lit by flickering, dingy glow-globes along the walls. The only exit was sealed by a massive iron door. At the other end of the room was a large metal table. It was surrounded by instruments that erased the difference between surgery and torture. The light was dim, but not so dark that I couldn’t see the overlapping bloodstains on the table. The floor around it was slick with obscene debris. The stench was slaughterhouse-thick.

  Beneath my feet, there was no floor. I was being dangled high over a circular shaft. It was about two metres wide, and the gaping black of great depth. Sloshing, scrabbling noises echoed up from the darkness.

  There were three orks standing guard. When they saw that I was awake, one of them dragged the door open and left, sealing the chamber off again with a bang. The other two watched me closely, growling as if warning me not to try anything. Thinking clearly was difficult through the haze of pain, but I noted their wariness. I had worked hard to create a fearsome legend for myself among the orks. Here was evidence of my success. I wondered how I might use this fact.

  After a few minutes, the door banged open as if a giant had kicked it. One had. Thraka strode into the chamber. He stopped at the edge of the pit. Our heads were almost level, and we exchanged a long stare. Thraka’s face was the purest essence of his benighted race. It was the monstrousness of war at its most savage – pure beast made more hideous by a crosshatching of scars. It was a leathered palimpsest of wounds. Some I had given him, and they were insignificant. The only wound that mattered was the one that had almost stopped him, but instead, following the dictates of perverse destiny, had been his making. The top of his skull was adamantium. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to the brain beneath to transform him into a prophet of orkish victory, but the claws that had operated on this ork’s mind were stained with the blood of billions.

  Thraka watched me closely. He watched me quietly. He was studying me. I was suddenly drenched in a sweat that had nothing to do with physical discomfort. The only thing worse than being face-to-face with a raging, howling ork is being face-to-face with a quiet one. So many human victories have depended on the orks’ tactical simplicity. They charged until they died, and that was all. But an ork who watched and learned, planned and strategised, an ork who meditated, and kept his thoughts to himself – there could be nothing more dangerous.

  Then the silence was broken, and to my eternal dishonour, it was I who broke it. ‘Filth!’ I yelled. ‘The Emperor’s wrath will blast you and all your accursed kind to the warp!’ My hatred burst the bonds of language, and in the next second I was baying an inarticulate ‘Rahhhhhh!’ at the beast. He continued to watch quietly.

  The irony of that moment does not escape me.

  After a few more shouts of incoherent, impotent rage, I calmed enough to speak again. ‘I will kill you,’ I hissed. ‘I make you that promise.’

  No reaction. Still that unnerving studying. I didn’t know what he was looking for, or whether he saw what he wanted in my face, but he stepped back after an eternal moment. The guard who had fetched him took that gesture as permission to have at me. It laughed and gave my left arm a hard yank, almost pulling it from my shoulder. There was a blur of movement from Thraka, and he stood with the guard struggling in the grip of his claw. The ork whimpered. Its feet pedalled air. Thraka held the other ork over the pit. His eyes, one real, one a targeting bionic, never left my face. His mouth spread in a grin of predatory challenge. Then he dropped the guard.

  The ork howled as it fell. The acoustics of the shaft turned its cry into a choir of hurt. The sound of impact was wet, and a long time in coming. The howl stopped.

  Thraka reached above me and took the chains in his claw. He was no longer smiling. The gaze of that eye was penetrating, evaluating. There was also a complicity, which I rejected with all the hatred of my own look. He gave a slight nod. To me? I was imagining that, surely. I prayed to the God-Emperor that I was mistaken. Then I heard the deep, final chunk of the claw slamming shut and the chains parting.

  The terrible pull on my upper arms ended, and with freedom came vertigo. I fell into darkness, into my final seconds and into a strange peace. There was nothing I could do. Nothing to struggle against. For the first time in my living memory, I was absolved of all responsibility. Duty ends only in death, and I had been vouchsafed a few moments to experience the release from duty. I commended my soul to the care of the Emperor, and went limp. I plunged into terrible sounds. A thick wind screamed against me. I saw nothing but the dark, and after the first second, it seemed that I was flying, not falling.

  I felt the pain of unfinished tasks. I hoped for forgiveness. I thought that there were worse deaths.

  I had the luxury of several long seconds to think these things. And even now, there are moments of marrow-deep exhaustion when I look back on this tiny sliver of rest with something like nostalgia before shame corrects my thinking.

  It was not shame that recalled me to duty on that day. It was the brutal but non-lethal impact of my landing. I did not hit metal. I hit liquid. It hurt like being slammed into brick, and then it took me down, smothering and choking. I had been limp. Now I thrashed in the foul blackness. I had no sense of up or down, no concept of anything at all except universal pain and, overriding even that, the divine command to resume my struggle.

  My agonised chest demanded I draw a breath. Filth flowed into my lungs instead. I spasmed, and I broke the surface of the stagnant water. I choked up the sludge in my lungs and flailed forward. My feet struck bottom almost right away, sliding on a slick pile that might have been stones and might have been skulls. The pile sloped up. Within a few metres, I was out of the water and crouched against the curved, slimy wall of the shaft. Breath heaving in and out of my lungs like a handful of claws, I turned around to face the darkness.

  I was almost overcome by a sense of total helplessness. I was not alone in this space. I could hear large bodies struggling and splashing nearby. But I could see nothing, I had no weapons, and I had only one arm. I braced myself and waited. After a minute, my eye adjusted, and I saw that there was faint illumination coming from phosphorescent fungi on the walls. The shaft had dropped me in one end of what seemed to be a large cave. It stretched out into the deep gloom before me, twisting out of sight. There were narrow banks along the walls. I felt the surface of the wall at my back. It was porous stone, not metal. I realised where I must be: in the lower reaches of the space hulk.

  The fact that I could breathe was another hint of Thraka’s enormous power. Space hulks were not uncommon among the orks. Once a Waaagh! reached a critical mass, the hulks were a favourite method of conveying war from one system to another. Many, but not all, used a planetoid as the core around which the patchwork collection of ships was assembled. This rocky core had an atmosphere in its interior. That necessitated a care and effort far beyond the norm for orks. I could feel Thraka’s presence and strength of will even down here.

  The struggle I was hearing came to an end. There was a high-pitched chittering that somehow conveyed fatal agony. For a moment, there was silence. Then splashing started again, drawing nearer. A large bulk was approaching, leaving a wake behind it. I looked about me, desperate for a weapon or a means of escape. The wall was unbroken, and there were no handholds. But just to my right was the half-submerged body of the guard. The greenskin had landed on this spur of rock, and been impaled through the neck. I knelt and searched the corpse. The ork’s gun had shattered, but the brute’s blade was still in its sheath. The weapon was a crude, massive cleaver. It was an awkward weapon for a human to wield, especially one-handed. It was also a gift from the Emperor Himself.

  And from no one else. No one.

  I rema
ined crouching, clutching the blade, listening to the approach of the predator. The splashing became shallow, and then there was an explosive scrabbling. I whirled, weapon extended. It met a shadow twice as thick and long as a man. The blade sank between chitinous plates. The weight of the beast knocked me against the wall. My feet lost their purchase and I slid down. The creature was propelled by dozens of tiny legs, and they clawed at me, shredding and tangling in what was left of my coat. Tusks like sickles snapped at my neck. The thing pushed its head down, trying to reach my throat, impaling itself more deeply on the cleaver. The mandibles brushed my skin. I pushed up with all my strength, my arm trembling with the effort. I cut through something important and was drenched in a flood of blood and other noxious fluids. The monster collapsed. I squirmed out from under the dead weight. I examined the creature as best I could in the dim light. It appeared to be a species of squig. It had the spines and wide jaws of those beasts, but its long, segmented body and exoskeleton owed more to the arthropod. Its tail ended in a straight stinger half the length of my leg. I could hear more of its kind not far away, and I was about to kick the corpse into the water when, on impulse, I hacked off the stinger. I turned the corpse over to its fellows and, stinger tucked under my arm, moved away from the eating frenzy.

  I kept to the wall that extended up the shaft. I made sure that I wasn’t about to be attacked, and then began pounding the stinger against the wall at about knee height. The stone was weak, the stinger strong. After a few hits, the tip gouged a hole a few centimetres deep. I held the stinger in place by squeezing it with the stump of my right arm. I hammered it into the wall with the flat of the blade. I kept at it until just over half of the stinger was wedged between rock. I stood up. Holding onto the wall with my left hand, I climbed onto the stinger. The footing was treacherous, but the stinger felt solid. I stood there for five full minutes, much longer than I should have to if I attempted what I was contemplating. The stinger held. My balance felt sure enough, if I leaned against the wall, to pound in another spike.

  It could be done. I could build a ladder for a one-armed man to climb. All I needed was enough stingers.

  I looked up towards the invisible mouth of the well. How far was there to go? A hundred metres? More? No way of knowing. I thought about how many stingers I might need. How many of those monsters I would have to kill. How endless my escape attempt would be.

  How easily I could die in the process.

  I thought about all of these things. Then I stepped back down to the ground, tightened my grip on the blade, and made my way toward the thrashing movements.

  I don’t know how long I was down there. In perpetual night and perpetual struggle, time was not even a concept. There were no cycles, only pauses of unpredictable length between convulsions of bloodletting. Survival necessitated absolute focus, and it wasn’t long before I was a creature of instinct and mechanical habit. I could afford no thought that might distract me. There was no space for either hope or despair. I fought, I killed, I sliced off stingers, and I built my steps. When I grew hungry, I ate the bitter, fatty meat of the creatures. It could easily have killed me, but I had no other choice. I was lucky. It kept me alive, and as rational thought shut down before animal need, I shed the pointless luxury of disgust.

  I scavenged a belt from the dead guard. It was so huge, I had to cut it in half. Then I had somewhere to sheathe the cleaver, and free up my hand.

  I became the most dangerous predator in that world. The squig-things were larger and stronger than I was, but they were mindless and incapable of learning. I grew adept at catching them from behind, leaping onto their heads and sinking my blade between the skull and the first segment of the armour, killing them before they could bring their stinger to bear. I killed, and killed, and killed, was wounded again and again, but was always triumphant. I like to believe that it was my faith that gave me the edge in those moments when my life teetered on a knife edge. I could barely articulate a prayer, but the knowledge of the Emperor’s protection was always there, as basic a fact of my existence as breathing.

  Sleep was the risk, the enemy, and the terrifying necessity. I did what I could to protect myself. I sacrificed precious stingers by planting them in an outward facing semicircle around the base of my ladder. I scattered armour plates in loose piles beyond my rough palisade, so I might be woken by the approach of an enemy. I slept in light, broken snatches, jerking awake at the slightest sound. Sometimes there was nothing there. Sometimes there was. My body learned never to do more than doze.

  More than hunger or pain, exhaustion became the rock against which my strength was eroded. But duty only ends in death. I was not dead. My duty was clear. I followed the path. I built my path. Step by step by step, hammering in one stinger at a time, rising one half-metre, then descending to kill for my construction material. The ladder rose, and it took me longer each time to climb up and down. My task became more and more difficult, dangerous and tiring the closer it came to completion.

  The effort to keep going required such extreme tunnel vision that I almost didn’t notice when I was within reach of the lip of the well.

  I killed the first guard with a single horizontal slash of the blade. It was no longer an awkward xenos weapon in my hand. It was my tooth, stinger and claw. It tore the ork’s throat wide open. Its head flopped backward. The ork gurgled and staggered forward, then back a step, its blood jetting over me. The beast hadn’t collapsed yet and I was already attacking its fellow. The other ork was staring at me, its jaw hanging low with incomprehension and panicked indecision. The greenskin started to respond, reaching for its own blade, but it was too late. I rammed the cleaver deep into that maw. With a crunch, the blade came out the back of its neck. The guard stumbled away, choking. It clutched at the blade, slicing its hands as it tried to pull the cleaver out of its head. The ork slumped to its knees, dark blood pouring down the length of the blade, slicking it. The guard managed to grasp the hilt and yanked with stupid strength. The ork pulled the blade out, killing itself.

  I checked the guards for firearms. They had none. I picked up my blade and approached the door. I placed my ear against it, but could hear nothing on the other side. No way to know if the guards’ death cries had alerted others.

  Nothing for it, then. I sheathed the cleaver, grabbed the door handle and leaned back. The door opened with a screeching grind. There was a corridor on the other side. It ran about twenty metres, and then opened into a wider space. There the light was brighter, and I squinted in pain, half-blind after so long in the darkness. There was noise ahead, a lot of it. Ork snarls, clanging, human moans. The sound of a crowd.

  There were no options. There was no plan. There was nowhere else to go. I had nothing except my will, my struggle, and my Emperor.

  They would suffice.

  Blade out, its weight a strain to hold one-handed, I walked down the corridor and into the light. Before me was a vast open area filled with cages. The slave pens. Waiting for me, as if I were late for an appointment, stood a squad of jailers, my new chains in their hands. I launched myself at them, and I did manage to cut the hand off one of them before they subdued me.

  As they dragged me off to a cage, there was a guttural laugh to my right. I knew whose laugh it was, and was sickened by the knowledge that by having survived the well, all I had done was entertain Thraka.

  Will, I told myself, fighting despair. Struggle. Emperor.

  They will suffice.

  Chapter Five

  The Shape of Redemption

  1. Rogge

  It took Rogge a minute to recognise the new prisoner. Like the rest of the male captives, his hair and beard were shaggy. They were an iron grey beneath the encrustation of filth, and that was unusual. Older slaves did not last long. Nor did the disabled, and this one was missing his right arm below the elbow. It was only when he saw that the man’s left eye was also gone, and what blazed in his right, that realisat
ion dawned.

  The temptation was to withdraw deeper into the cage and the anonymity of mass misery. But that was only delaying the inevitable. And it was not the path he had sworn to himself he would follow, if given the chance. So he shuffled forward. ‘Commissar?’ he said.

  Yarrick turned that gaze on him. It scanned Rogge, seeing everything. Rogge knew the ork superstition about the power of Yarrick’s look. In this moment, he absolutely shared their belief. ‘Colonel,’ Yarrick acknowledged. He turned away from Rogge and moved to the bars of the cage. Rogge saw that eye flicking over the space of the slave pens. ‘Tell me what I need to know,’ he said.

  Rogge swallowed. No judgement, no condemnation, no demands for an explanation. Instead, a simple request for information, spoken with the confidence of a man who had no conception of surrender. Rogge stood straighter even as he felt the temptation to weep with gratitude. He had his second chance. Redemption would be his. ‘There is no pattern to the shifts,’ he told the commissar. ‘We never know how long we will be held here. When we are taken out, we work until we drop.’

  Yarrick nodded. Rogge watched him touch the bars of the cage, testing their strength. The soldering was sloppy, the construction of the cage crude, but the enclosure would have been strong enough to hold orks, let alone humans. There would be no breaking out from the cage itself.

  Yarrick grunted and looked beyond the bars at the huge space of the holding pen.

  ‘A former cargo hold, I think,’ Rogge said. For all the encrustations of ork scaffolding, totemic sculptures and savage graffiti, the human construction of the walls and floor was still evident. They were inside a captured freighter, of that much Rogge was sure. Continual modifications by the orks had blurred the boundaries between this ship and the adjoining ones, fusing them into an indistinguishable hell of metal and refuse.