Astra Militarum Read online

  I would do that the only way I knew how: by acting for the good of the Imperium. And I would accept the responsibility for however many deaths such action would entail.

  Our shift began. We shuffled out of the cage as the returning slaves staggered in. We moved towards the main exit from the pen. It was directly across from the one by which I had first arrived. One group of prisoners edged towards the left-hand wall. There was another, smaller doorway just beyond the last of the terraced rows of cages, near the corner with the far wall. Ork guards came and went though that passage. There was also a pipe that emerged from its ceiling and ran as far as was visible down the corridor. It was an ork modification of the original structure, and like all such ork construction projects, it was sloppy, clumsy, and arrogant in its invitation to catastrophe. Promethium dripped from numerous joints and splits. Combustible pools spread on the floor.

  Behriman snarled at the wayward group and whipped them. His bluff worked because his blows were real. The guards paid him no attention. He was part of the routine. They didn’t notice that he was herding his charges closer to the pipe. Leaning against the wall to the right of the doorway was a bored guard. He had his prod tucked loosely under an arm.

  The prod was electrical.

  I slowed my steps, braced for action.

  Behriman snapped his whip around the guard’s neck. The ork choked on his surprise. He grabbed at the coil around his throat. He dropped his prod. A slave grasped it. The man’s name was Averon, and I celebrate his memory. He lunged for the doorway and stabbed up with the prod, jabbing into one of the weak joints of the pipe. There was a flash and sizzle, and a shower of sparks.

  As the fuel ignited, the pipe bent and arched like a tormented serpent. For a long second, it contained the fire within itself, but there were too many little fissures though which air and combustible met. A fountain of liquid fire burst out into the corridor. It gathered strength and momentum. It became a blinding storm that raged out of the doorway. Orks and humans scattered. Behriman sprinted to one side. The grasping flames missed him, but the rest of his group was bathed in incandescent death. They greeted their reward for their heroism with screams to haunt a guilty conscience. Most fell, writhing, but some ran. They actually sprinted as each breath sucked flame into their lungs. As I saw these martyrs rush with open arms to fall unerringly on orks, spreading the contagion of their doom to their captors, I knew that I had done the right thing. If I had in any way inspired that woman, who had become a howling, whirling torch with flames leaping three metres in height, to incinerate not one but two greenskins before she perished, then I was following the true path of my duty.

  Not far down the corridor, around the first bend it must have been, the inferno found something even more nourishing than the orkish promethium. It was, as we were about to discover, an ammunition cache. It must have been large. There was a boom deep enough to shatter breastbones. The floor heaved, knocking us off our feet. The left-hand wall bulged for a moment before it peeled back, the blossoming of a steel flower. The fireball roiled out and filled the upper half of the slave pen, a sudden sun baking our flesh. Below the deep thunder of the explosions came the high-pitched shrieks of ricochets as small arms ammunition cooked off. Then came the smoke. It was oily, thick, strangling, smothering. It was a cloud of black wrapping itself around eyes dazzled by the fire. A few moments later, I heard the groaning roar of tons of metal collapsing, sealing the hole again to everything but smoke.

  The slave pen was a maelstrom. There was no order, only panic mixed with rage. Humans and orks ran and fled and clashed and died. Coughing, eyes streaming, I couldn’t see more than a few bleary metres around me in the erupting, cacophonous murk. I rose to my feet. Hand over mouth, I took as deep a breath as I dared, and then, before the hack in my chest silenced me, shouted, ‘With me!’ I sensed the presence of followers as I stumbled towards the smouldering corridor. The flames were little more than fading glows in the smoky night there now. The floor was hot under the tattered soles of my boots, and I stepped on things that crunched and cracked like burnt wood, but I knew them to be something far grimmer.

  I was coughing all the time now. My chest was being scraped by burning nails, and great, wracking heaves were trying to toss my lungs up my throat. My head was being squeezed by a mailed fist. But I pushed deeper into the billowing smoke, crouching as low to the ground as possible. This was the one direction I could be reasonably certain the orks would not be going.

  The corridor hit an intersection, and the left-hand passage was a ragged funnel into the devastation of the munitions depot. The fires were still fierce there. They filled the space with a pulsing, wavering red glow. The whines and reports of detonating rounds were still frequent, but I led the way in all the same. The warped floor was covered by burned things that had once been orks, but were now little more than organic shrapnel. The hold was a big one, and while to the left there was only the impassable collapse, the explosions had also blown out the decks above, so the air was a little clearer. It was like breathing inside an oven, but at least I was breathing. And I could see who had followed me.

  Rogge, Castel, Bekket, Trower, Polis, Vale and Behriman. A small group, and I saw no others coming up in the corridor. Perhaps there were slaves even now storming down the other corridors. Perhaps indeed, but only in dreams. More likely, the orks were already regaining control. No matter. We who were free to act were what mattered, and I would make sure we mattered to Thraka in the most lethal ways possible.

  ‘Find weapons,’ I told the others. ‘There must be some that are still usable. Do it quickly.’

  They did. As I scavenged for myself, I saw the group act with a directness and efficiency of purpose that would have done credit to a well-drilled infantry squad. There was something rather like joy in their determination. I have seen the phenomenon many times before. When people have been deprived of ability to act, they will respond to leadership with gratitude and vigour. To have direction becomes a form of salvation in its own right. Harness this human characteristic, and there is very little that you cannot accomplish.

  The ork weapons were massive, clumsy, untrustworthy horrors. But there were stolen Imperial arms here, too. I found a laspistol and a sabre. The pistol was no storm bolter. It was here, though, so it would do. My companions also armed themselves with blades and guns. Most of them had found lasrifles, but Castel held an eviscerator. In her choice of the two-handed chainsword, I saw the final repudiation of her previous calling. The orks had turned her into a butcher. Well, I would let that be added to the greenskins’ debts. We were now a war party. My troops awaited my orders.

  I thought for a moment. To venture into the corridors would be pointless. We needed another way to move through the space hulk and reach the Inflexible. I led the way through the heaps of guttering wreckage to the wall opposite the collapse. It seemed stable, though it, too, had been damaged. The metal had been punched open, but not all the way through. I looked into the wall, saw a tangle of struts and, further up, accessible though a bit of a climb, a duct. I pointed. ‘We go there,’ I said. ‘We will destroy the greenskin filth from within.’

  Grand words.

  And I meant them. Absolutely.

  Chapter Seven

  Inflexible

  1. Yarrick

  We became worms, tunnelling our way through the darkness of the shafts, ducts, and access hatches that linked the component ships of the space hulk. We were blind, and for the first while, we did not even have a sense of the direction of our movements. We went down blind alleys, where ventilation shafts ended against exterior hulls, and had to retrace our steps and try other routes at random until we found one that took us to a connecting breech in the vessel skins. We could hear orks on the other side of the walls wherever we went. The sounds of the pursuing greenskins chased us down the byways of our journey. Sometimes the sounds of clattering boots and shouted, alien threats were distant
echoes. At other times, capture seemed imminent. But the apparent distances were all tricks of the pipes, the random vagaries of acoustic perversity. Some metal arteries down which we travelled were large enough to walk in. Most were no more than crawl spaces. After about an hour, when I judged that we had left the slave pen safely behind, and were beyond the reach of any likely pursuit, I let us travel toward a light source. We had to take stock of where we were.

  The light came from a split in an elbow of the shaft down which we crawled. I put my ear to the crack. There was no sound of nearby orks. I twisted until I was lying on my back and kicked out at the split. The noise of my banging sounded huge to me, and I stopped after every half-dozen kicks to listen again. No greenskin came to investigate. Another minute of blows and the shaft parted enough for me to poke my head through. I was looking down from the ceiling of a nondescript corridor. In the direction I was facing, the passageway ended about six metres further on at a bulkhead. In the corridor’s right-hand wall I could see a viewing block.

  I withdrew, kicked the opening wider, and dropped down. I asked Polis to come with me. We made our way to the viewing block. The temple dominated the scene. I watched Polis take in the angle of our perspective on that structure. His lips moved in silent calculations. His eyes glazed. After a minute, they cleared and he looked at me.

  ‘Do you know where we have to go?’ I asked.

  He nodded. He looked faintly ridiculous, clad in his Munitorum rags and clutching his lasrifle. He was a little man playing at war, and desperately afraid of the game. But he continued to function, and when I said, ‘You’ll have to lead us,’ he nodded again. That agreement made him perhaps the bravest member of our group.

  We returned to the gap in the shaft. Behriman and Bekket hauled us up. Polis took point. The nature of our journey changed. Though Polis had to pause often to get his trembling under control, he changed our wandering into an advance. We were no longer worms. We were spiders, the shafts and connections between ships the strands our web. We were tracing the links that would, I vowed, bring an end to Thraka. Three hours after Polis’s single look at the world outside our scrabbling, crawling, climbing darkness, we reached light again, and another tear in a hull. Polis squeezed to one side so I could see what waited for us.

  I choked back a bark of bitter laughter. Before me, across a few hundred metres of open space, stood the Inflexible. Polis had been right: very little attached it to the other ships. It was resting on its landing gear. Rough scaffolding rose from the floor, going as high as the canopy. There didn’t seem to be anything affixed to the lighter that would stop it from taking off.

  Except for one thing: the Inflexible wasn’t tied to other ships because it was inside one now. I should not have been surprised. The lighter was too small to be used as anything other than what it was. The orks were modifying the craft, making it into their own creature, and had surrounded it with slapped-together scaffolding. The space before us was another cargo hold, a vast one, kilo­metres high. The ceiling was invisible, and I didn’t wonder that Polis, in his state, had mistaken the darkness above for the black of the void itself. The obstacle might not be a fatal one, I thought. If the Inflexible were still armed, it might be possible to blast an escape through the hull of this freighter.

  I could see a half-dozen orks at work on the Inflexible. The rest of the floor, the decking which had been a bulkhead before the ship was upended, was a scrapyard of miscellaneous construction projects in various stages of assembly and disintegration. Glow-globes, fuel drum fires and flaring welding torches illuminated another ten or twenty ships, all about the size of the lighter. Towards the far end of the hold, I could see the mangled outline of a Thunderhawk, and I shuddered at the tragedy that its presence implied. New, roughly assembled catwalks lined the walls starting about thirty metres up. They went past entrances leading elsewhere in the giant ship’s hull, but I saw no stairs down. Either the catwalks were no more than observation platforms, or they were part of a larger construction project that was abandoned out of boredom.

  I pulled back inside the shaft to speak to the others. We didn’t have to worry about being overheard. We were given cover by the noise of endless perverse construction. I outlined the vessel’s situation. ‘We’re almost there,’ I then said. ‘But to reach the Inflexible, we will be exposed.’ We could minimise the risk by hugging the wall some of the way, but at the last we would have to cross open ground to the ship.

  Polis trembled, but was the first to nod. The gesture might have been a nervous tick, but it made sure the others followed with alacrity. I motioned Vale forward with me. We paused at the exit from the shaft so he could get a good luck at his ship. ‘A shame we’re at the wrong end,’ he said. The engines faced us, not the cockpit.

  ‘Will it take off?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Its flight-worthiness doesn’t look like it’s been attacked. I can’t know until I try to leave.’ He looked around. ‘Commissar, are you sure we can get out of here at all?’

  ‘No. But I am sure that the attempt is necessary.’

  ‘I see,’ he said quietly.

  I believe that he truly did see. I believe that he already knew the path that lay ahead of him.

  He turned to me. ‘Commissar,’ he said, ‘with your permission, I would like to lead the way.’

  ‘That is your right,’ I told him. ‘You are our pilot. Yours will be the honour to take us from this place.’

  We both knew that we were talking about a different sort of honour entirely. The set of his jaw was grim. His eyes were hard, sharp, edged iron that had been tempered to the strength that would sustain him in the coming minutes.

  We watched the area near our refuge. The shadows were deep here, and there were no construction materials of particular interest. After several minutes, no orks had passed through. I slid out, feet-first. The drop was less than two metres, and it would be harder to climb down with one arm than simply to let myself fall. The others followed, and Vale headed off, glancing back to make sure we were staying close.

  Rogge was eyeing the Inflexible with a sick intensity.

  ‘Something wrong, colonel?’ I asked. There was no concern in my tone.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said again, as if he hadn’t believed himself the first time.

  Trower snorted. I turned my eye on him, and he cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, commissar,’ he said.

  I held his gaze a few moments more before releasing him. I would not have dissent and disrespect in our numbers. We were still soldiers of the Imperium. We would conduct ourselves as such. I expected the men under my watch to maintain the same discipline even as they arrived at the Golden Throne.

  We moved in single file, hugging the wall, draped in shadow. We weren’t spotted. After a few hundred metres, Vale stopped and crouched behind a pile of scrap metal. He was staring fixedly at the Inflexible. His lips were curled in pained anger. When I saw what he was looking at, I felt an answering pang of fury. The forward half of the starboard engine, which had been hidden from our view until now, had been partially dismantled. Its casing was open, and even my untrained eye could see there were important elements missing. There was too much empty space there. But the engine had not been removed altogether. I did not want to imagine what would happen if someone attempted a take-off. I did not want to, but forced myself to do so.

  And then there was a cry. It did not come from any of us, but was on our side of the hold. I looked up in time to see a figure plummeting from the catwalk above us. The ork hit the ground with a heavy, sick crunch. I heard a few braying laughs, but no other reaction from the creature’s fellows. It lay still. A weapon had fallen with it: a rifle with a long barrel. I had never heard of ork snipers – it wasn’t in their nature to fight at such uninteresting distances – but that was a weapon that could have hit targets at a considerable range.

  At least as far as the catwa
lk to the ground.

  The back of my neck tensed. I felt the phantom kiss of a round that had never been fired. We scrambled back against the wall, seeking cover in the deeper shadows. I craned my head back, peering into the flickering gloom. Through the slats of the platform, I had a vague impression of a gigantic shape moving away. Metal creaked under heavy footsteps. Then nothing more. I looked back down at the corpse of the ork. How had it fallen? I couldn’t see how even a greenskin could be that clumsy. It hadn’t been under fire. There wasn’t anything going on up there.

  Somehow, the ork must have slipped. That was what I told myself, and I sensed that there was a vital imperative that I believe it. There was no other possible explanation. None that fell within any sane conception of the universe.

  We waited, weapons at ready. Our position was bad. The only cover was the scrap piles, and the ones nearby were no more than chest-high. If an attack was coming, we had no time to move to better ground. Across the breadth of the giant hold, the distinctly orkish work that erased the difference between construction and demolition continued uninterrupted. We had not been spotted.

  Vale had turned his attention back to the Inflexible once more. He said, ‘There are only three greenskins working on this side. Do you think you can give me cover while I board?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I did not try to talk him out of what he was planning to do. His action would, at the very least, have a strategic benefit.

  Beside me, I heard Rogge gasp.

  2. Rogge

  Vale was mad, and Yarrick was worse. The revelation was painful, terrifying, and unavoidable.

  When the state of the Inflexible had become clear, Rogge had felt the cancerous grasp of despair. The ship was supposed to have been his means of salvation. In co-piloting the craft, he would strike back at the orks, restore his honour, and leave this terrible place. But the lighter had been mutilated by the enemy. There was no hope here, and so there was no hope anywhere. What could Yarrick’s little band accomplish beyond distinctly messy suicide? Rogge had thought the renewal of honour needed the commissar’s respect. But the high regard of a madman was worthless. Vale was about to march to his death, and Yarrick was going to help.