Astra Militarum Read online

  The slave cages had likely once been freight containers, and they were stacked in ziggurat formations on all sides of the hold. Ramps granted access to the upper levels. A large mustering space occupied the centre of the floor. There, slaves were gathered, organised, sorted, abused, tortured, killed. The orks didn’t allow the other slaves to clear away the dead until the bodies had piled up to the point that they were a nuisance. Rogge had seen many shifts pass with a dozen or more bodies left to be trampled into pulp. The cage he and Yarrick shared was on the floor level, and blood sometimes seeped in through the bars.

  There were some yells and scuffling behind them. They turned around. A few of the prisoners were staring upward, spitting and cursing at the cage’s ceiling. Rogge pointed. ‘Cal Behriman,’ he said with all the contempt he could muster. Sitting on top of the centre of the cage was a second, smaller one. It held only one prisoner. It contained no luxuries except space. The man inside ignored the taunts. He sat, impassive, eating something rank from a metal bowl.

  Yarrick was frowning. ‘Why is he isolated?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s our overseer,’ Rogge explained. He pointed back outside the cage, at the other small boxes scattered around the hold, all of them sitting on top of other, larger containers. ‘There’s one for every dozen or so enclosures, as far as I can tell. These orks like seeing us whipped and prodded by one of our own. The traitor is given a bit more food and space, but has to sit and hear what we think of him.’

  Yarrick was shaking his head. ‘Too elaborate,’ he said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘By ork standards, that’s a very sophisticated bit of cruelty.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Just another example of the strength of our enemy, colonel.’

  Rogge curled a lip. ‘He’s a little tyrant,’ he said. ‘A ship’s cook with dreams above his station.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I hope he enjoys his reign while it lasts.’

  Yarrick said nothing in reply. He watched Behriman for a moment more before turning his attention to their fellows in the cage. ‘All the prisoners are human?’ he asked.

  ‘Everyone I’ve seen,’ Rogge confirmed.

  ‘Good.’ The commissar took a breath, and seemed to grow before Rogge’s eyes. When he spoke again, he was taller than the cage. ‘Fellow children of the Emperor,’ he began, ‘you should feel no despair. Prepare yourselves for struggle and sacrifice, but also for victory. The orks have brought us deep within the heart of their power. We should thank them for the opportunity. Let us thank them by showing them what a terrible mistake they have made.’

  Rogge stared at him, dumbstruck. They had been speaking quietly, but now Yarrick was orating for the benefit of the entire hold. His voice echoed off the walls.

  Orks came running.

  2. Yarrick

  The beating was a small price to pay. I had new bruises in the shape of boot soles on my torso, and my face was a swollen, bleeding mess. Trivial matters. Less trivial was the question of why the orks had held back. By their standards, I hadn’t been beaten – I’d been gently admonished to behave myself. Why I was not broken or dead was a disturbing question. But I could not be distracted by it. What mattered was that I had spoken, and I had been heard. I didn’t know how I was going to strike against Thraka, but strike I would. To that end, it was necessary that the slaves think of themselves not as prisoners, but as combatants. I wanted them predisposed to struggle. They should be thinking about strategy and retaliation instead of their own despair. I had no illusions. Whatever happened, it was very unlikely that any of us would be leaving the space hulk. But we could still achieve victory. The goals on Golgotha and here were the same: the end of Thraka. It didn’t matter who the prisoners were. That ork was a threat to every human life, so it was the duty of every human to fight him to the death.

  I didn’t expect a mass uprising, which would be useless and suicidal. What I wanted was to see who would respond most concretely to my exhortation.

  In the cage, as the hours passed, and we waited, too packed in to crouch or sit, they spoke to me, and made themselves known. They had all been part of the Golgotha Crusade, but in a variety of capacities. Lieutenant Benjamin Vale had been the pilot of the lighter Inflexible. The vessel had been captured as it left Golgotha and tried to rejoin the departing fleet. Two troopers from the Armageddon 117th, Hans Bekket and Hadrian Trower, had also survived that last flight and been taken alongside Vale. These men were soldiers. I salute their courage in stepping forward, but I would have expected nothing less.

  There were two others who approached me during my first hours in the cage. I would have their valour noted. Aranaya Castel was a medicae who had been caught when Hadron Base itself was overrun. She had combat training, but had never served on the front lines. Now the orks were amusing themselves by forcing her to work in their grotesque surgeries. These were not places of healing. They were houses of pain. The orks who ruled them delighted in experimenting with scalpel and syringe, and Castel’s shifts were spent in hauling away the bloody detritus of those experiments.

  Then there was Ernst Polis. He, too, had been on the base, and was a Munitorum logistician. He had no training at all, and had simply been planetside to assist the coordination of our supply lines when the disaster had struck. He was one of the most cursed men I had ever met. He had an eidetic memory, and had never experienced combat until Golgotha. Every atrocity and monstrosity he witnessed, he retained with perfect clarity. I don’t know what this balding little man had been like before his capture. I imagine a rather tiresome obsessive consumed by minutiae. Now his eidetic memory had become a curse. He was barely sane. Trauma had produced a deep autism that was the only thing keeping him alive. He held awful reality at bay by erecting a screen of itemisation. He catalogued and numbered everything he saw. It was possible to converse with him, but only just.

  When, muttering and counting, he squeezed his way past the larger prisoners to tell me, eyes on the ground, that he wanted to help, I said, ‘Tell me how you can.’

  ‘What do you want to know? There are between twelve and fifteen orks guarding the hold at any one time, approximately a hundred prisoners to a cage, but twice as many prisoners in total than are in the hold right now because there are two shifts, and both shifts are never present at the same time, and when it is our shift we will be taken to work salvage in one of four ships in the immediate vicinity, away from this Carnack-class transport, but all salvage returns to this hub–’

  He went on without taking a breath. I broke in a few times to ask about the other ships he had seen. His memory did appear to be perfect. As fractured as he was, his ability to remember anything he saw was a useful one. He had also managed to scavenge, from a captured trader’s ship, a scrap of vellum and a stylus. The orks didn’t care that he had these objects. I did. We began work on a map.

  As for Rogge, I wasn’t sure. I did not know what had happened when that second ork army attacked our rearguard. Perhaps no commander would have been able to stop, or even slow, that strike. But from the look of hungry guilt that gnawed his face, I judged that he had failed his men and the rest of the crusade. He was hoping, I thought, to wipe away that guilt through redeeming action. If so, then his guilt might be useful.

  I didn’t know yet if the man would be.

  Three people died at Behriman’s hands during my first shift. Five the next one. Come the third, I gave serious thought to killing him. But there was no opportunity. I was always too far from him, and fell under the whip of an ork or one of the other human overseers. Those traitors, too, deserved my special hatred, but Behriman, perched above my cage, was the perpetual presence. He was also the most savage. The others did not spare the lash, but they did not kill. They left that to the orks.

  Before I had a chance to close with Behriman, I no longer knew how many shifts I had worked. As in the well, time had smeared, become senseless. Our duties
were salvage. It was killing work: disassembling what was indicated, hauling machines and scrap and whatever eccentric piece of material was desired in crude carts that were hard enough to push when they were empty. Whenever we left the cage, we moved through a cyclopean collage of metal fused with stone. For the most part, what I saw was a labyrinth of corridors and holds. Ragged tears in bulkheads and hulls created links where none should be. Waste, grime and orkish scrawls were the universal constant, erasing the differences between the ships. I passed through one set of corridors a half-dozen times before I noticed that the construction beneath the ork improvements was not human.

  Sometimes, I would haul my load past a viewing block, and see the exterior of the space hulk. It looked like a city in an earthquake. Ships of every make and size were crammed together, their sterns sunk into the planetoid. They slanted crazily this way and that. The longer they had been part of the hulk, the more they had melded into each other, losing their identities as voidships. Some structures no longer resembled vessels at all, if they ever had been. Towering over the rest of the fractured skyline was a massive shape, a broad-shouldered monstrosity that must have absorbed a dozen freighters as it thrust its way into being. The peak was in the shape of a gigantic ork skull. It gazed down upon the rest of the world with snarling satisfaction. Lights blazed perpetually inside its eyes. It was a temple to savagery.

  We dragged the salvage to an enormous pit to be sorted according to whatever madness moved ork technology at any given moment. The path to the depot passed through what had once been a launch bay. Upended, all of its equipment and shuttlecraft had wound up as treacherous hills of debris on the new floor. It was here, in the space between the mounds of broken angles, that I had my opportunity.

  I was about three cart-lengths away from Behriman. He was whipping an older man. The slave was younger than I was, I think, but his hair had turned the white of dirty snow. I had seen him a few times, noticed the way his shoulders sagged under invisible lead, and known that he would not last much longer. His eyes had the lifelessness of clay. Perhaps his end would be a mercy. Even so, when he stumbled, and Behriman laid into him, I let go of my cart. There were no other overseers nearby. The path took sharp corners around the heaps a half-dozen metres ahead and behind. I guessed that I had time to come up behind Behriman while he was busy and kill him before an ork saw what I was doing. In my load of salvage, I had been careful to add a large shard from a mirror that had been in the stateroom of a one-time civilian luxury yacht. I grabbed the shard and started forward.

  The old man collapsed. The other slaves looked on as I closed in on Behriman. They kept dragging their carts. I was less than ten paces away. Behriman dropped the whip and crouched over the slave. He wrapped his arms around the man’s head and neck. I raised the glass. Then I heard Behriman whisper. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I heard the old captive’s response: ‘Yes.’ He spoke with relief. And gratitude.

  And I think, perhaps, joy.

  Behriman snapped his neck.

  He straightened and turned to face me. He said nothing. He didn’t raise his whip. He waited.

  I lowered my hand and returned to my cart. I began hauling it again. Behriman was already bawling invective at a slave whose pace had slackened. Behind us, an ork driver appeared, laughing as Behriman dished out encouraging blows.

  At the end of a shift, exhaustion was so total that we would fall asleep as soon as we were packed back into the cage. Since we couldn’t lie down, we slept standing up, leaning against each other. This time, though, I forced myself to stay awake a little longer. I made sure I was standing directly beneath Behriman’s cage. When the rest of the prisoners were unconscious, I said, ‘What did you ask the old man?’

  He didn’t answer at first. He was sprawled on his back on the mesh floor of the enclosure, and I wondered if he was asleep. He spoke after a minute. ‘I asked him if he desired the Emperor’s peace.’

  ‘You presume much.’

  A tiny movement of his shoulders, as if he’d shrugged. ‘The man had served to the limit of his body’s strength. He was as loyal a servant of the Emperor as any decorated officer. He deserved mercy, and a moment’s dignity to compose his soul.’

  ‘And who are you to grant such gifts?’

  ‘I’m the one who is there.’

  I nodded to myself. I was impressed. The man was unafraid to be completely despised in order that he might do what was necessary. He had what he saw as a sacred duty, and he was being true to it.

  Here was a rare find.

  ‘What do you know of this sector’s layout?’ I asked. I had only seen the same narrow routes again and again.

  ‘Quite a bit. Why?’

  ‘Because I think we have bided our time long enough.’ It was time to strike.

  Chapter Six

  Desperate Glory

  1. Behriman

  He lay on the floor of his cage for another hour, listening to the clangs and snarls and wails that filled the air of the space hulk. He thought about the conversation he had just had with Sebastian Yarrick. He thought about how he had brutalised the bodies of others and his own spirit in the service of a greater mercy. He had carried the burden of this duty so long that he could barely remember his life before his capture. Now that weight was at last about to be lifted from his shoulders. He allowed himself a single, body-shaking sob.

  2. Rogge

  The commissar spoke. The prisoners listened. Rogge listened. His soul burned with purpose.

  Yarrick didn’t orate as he had when he first arrived in their midst. He didn’t draw the orks’ attention. He spoke quietly, to one small group at a time, and what he said spread in whispers during the shifts until, Rogge was sure, every human in the hold knew, word for word, what the commissar had said. Yarrick spoke of war. What Rogge heard, what he was sure all heard, were words of hope. They were going to be leaving this hell. The breakout was imminent.

  3. Yarrick

  ‘Where do we go?’ Rogge asked, his eyes bright with fervour.

  ‘The Inflexible,’ I answered. I gestured to Polis.

  The little man nodded, and continued to nod while he spoke. ‘I have been past the Inflexible three times during the last eight shifts, during which time I walked 20,235 steps, including the return trip, which ended the shift…’ He caught himself, closing his eyes tightly with the effort. ‘The Inflexible does not appear to be significantly damaged or fused beyond basic docking apparatus to this construct.’ He clamped his mouth shut so tightly his teeth clicked, and he stopped talking. Purpose was mending him.

  ‘And we have our pilot,’ I said. Vale nodded.

  ‘What if he’s killed?’ someone asked from the deeper shadows of the cage.

  ‘I can fly it,’ Rogge answered.

  That surprised me. He was a tanker, not Navy. ‘Since when?’ I asked.

  He gave an embarrassed shrug. ‘Since home. My father’s private yacht.’

  ‘Hardly the same thing,’ Vale protested, offended.

  ‘No,’ Rogge began, ‘but the basic principles–’

  ‘Are sufficiently similar,’ I broke in, ending the argument. ‘A pilot is a pilot, and a ship is a ship.’ If Rogge’s privileged background proved useful, then we were the better for it. ‘At the start of the next shift,’ I said. ‘That’s when we hit them.’

  There was no cycle of night and day in the hulk, just perpetual grimy twilight lit by torches, flickering glow-globes and filthy biolumes. We didn’t have the luxuries of such concepts as ‘morning’. People just rested as well as they could until it was time to work again. And no one could be said to be alone when one could barely move for the crowding. All the same, I was given a form of privacy as everyone in the cage fell into uneasy dozing. Everyone but Castel, who was still jumpy after her latest stint amidst the horrors of the ork surgeries.

  ‘None of us will leave this place a
live,‘ she said.

  ‘More than likely,’ I agreed.

  ‘Then why give us false hope?’

  ‘I haven’t. I never said we would succeed in escaping. Even if we can launch the lighter, it will be recaptured or destroyed before we get far.’

  ‘Then why even try for it?’

  ‘If it becomes possible to escape, that will be the most likely means. More importantly, an operational ship could do a fair bit of damage, especially if we choose the target wisely.’

  ‘You have a target in mind,’ she realised.

  ‘The temple.’ So much work had gone into constructing that massive ork head. The structure was a symbol of power. That was where I would find Thraka.

  Castel was silent for a moment. She was thinking. Finally, she said, ‘Commissar, despite what you said, you must realise that most of the people here are thinking of escape, not war.’

  ‘I do.’ That was regrettable, but unavoidable. What mattered was that they were stirred to action. Even if people died fighting for a selfish reason, their struggle would still be serving the greater cause. They would die with more honour than they had now. ‘What will you be thinking of?’ I asked.

  ‘These creatures have profaned every aspect of my calling,’ she spat. ‘I will be going to war.’

  ‘Then I will be honoured to fight alongside you,’ I told her. Though she had been unafraid to ask me hard questions a moment before, I felt the pride radiate from her now.

  She had been praised not by a fellow prisoner, or simply a fellow human being. She had been praised by an idea, a myth called Commissar Sebastian Yarrick. Ever since the battle for Hades Hive, his legend had shadowed my every act and utterance. I was very conscious of this man’s existence, but I wasn’t sure that he and I were truly one and the same. The legend was a useful tool. He inspired men and he was feared by orks, and rightly so. But his continued existence depended on my being worthy of him.