Astra Militarum Read online

  Rogge remembered his offer to co-pilot, and feared that he was about to receive his orders. Yarrick didn’t glance his way. He and Vale spoke quietly, as if what was about to happen was a rational, strategic operation. Rogge looked back and forth between the two men and the wounded ship. He saw nothing but madness, and the worst of it was not what was going to happen when Vale went running off to meet the orks on his own, but why he was about to throw his life away. Vale was going to die because of Yarrick.

  Rogge felt as if a blindfold had been torn from his eyes. He had been as dazzled by the commissar’s reputation and force of personality as everyone else. But now he could see the man for what he was: a tyrant who played lethal games with the lives of others because he had the power to do so. On Golgotha, he had sacrificed a magnificent army to his obsessive pride. Now he was repeating the pattern. How many prisoners had died in that little uprising? And where would that one-armed, one-eyed monster of war take them now? How would he choose to feast on the deaths of his new followers?

  He won’t feast on mine. But on the heels of that thought came another: What do I do now? He had nowhere to go. He took in the faces of his other companions, and their unthinking commitment to Yarrick’s leadership. There was no help or sense to be found there.

  Yarrick spoke to the entire group. His voice was low, and would be inaudible only a few metres away, but it filled Rogge’s consciousness as utterly as if blasted from banks of vox-casters. Yarrick’s face was half-hidden by months’ growth of hair and beard. Hunger had made it gaunter than ever. Bruises and wounds bit into its flesh, and the eyelid over the empty socket did not close all the way, revealing a slit of darkness. Yarrick’s was a face of weathered crags, a map of decades of war in all its forms – glorious, brutal, desperate, triumphant, annihilating. It was, Rogge thought, a face that no longer knew anything but war. Rogge flashed on his memories of luxury and pleasure back on Aumet. Some were still quite recent, fresh enough to inspire the hope that they might not be the last of their kind.

  But though Rogge stared at Yarrick and feared him, that voice and the fire that fed it were mesmerising. Yarrick said, ‘We will strike here, and we will hurt the greenskins.’ And Rogge felt a dangerous excitement in his chest. Yarrick said, ‘While the orks struggle with this wound, we will take the battle to the heart of this abomination, and they will fear us before they die.’ And Rogge felt a sense of mission flare.

  Then he remembered how that mission must surely end, and regained his senses. There was no way off the space hulk. The only true mission was to stay alive from one moment to the next.

  Yarrick turned to Polis. ‘Can you guide us to the temple?’ Polis nodded, rapid bobs like a rodent. His lips were moving in an unending, inaudible commentary, but his eyes were clear, shining with deadly fervour. To Vale, Yarrick said, ‘How long once you’re aboard before you can take off?’ He spoke, Rogge thought, as if the lighter really would be able to fly.

  ‘Not long,’ Vale answered. ‘How much time do you need to get clear?’

  ‘Polis?’ Yarrick asked.

  The Munitorum gnome scanned the wall behind them. He pointed to an opening about a hundred metres on. Unlike the one from which they had emerged, this was not a tear in the skin of the vessel. It was an actual doorway, now tilted on its side. ‘There,’ Polis muttered. ‘There.’ He cleared his throat, his lips moving all the time. ‘A good start, good start, find the vectors from there, yes yes, kill the temple, twenty metres to Inflexible, three visible enemy, disassembled engine cowling a product of Armageddon manufactorum Megiddo III…’ His muttering faded back into mouthed silence.

  He’s getting worse, Rogge thought. The extended journey through the walls, with no greenskin encounters, had calmed him. But since that ork had fallen, his incessant cataloguing had started up again. He wasn’t trembling, but his eyes had the shine of the Yarrick fever.

  ‘Understood,’ Vale said.

  You understand nothing, Rogge thought. Mad. Mad. All of you.

  And he had no choice but to follow for now.

  Still crouching behind the pile of discarded metal, Vale faced Yarrick and made the sign of the aquila. Yarrick returned a one-handed version. That was all. There were no further words exchanged. Rogge felt the blood drain from his face at the matter-of-fact manner with which Vale accepted his imminent death, and the ease with which Yarrick sent him to it.

  Vale leaped over the cover and sprinted toward the Inflexible. Yarrick trained his pistol on the orks. The others raised their firearms and took aim. ‘Wait,’ Yarrick said.

  They held their fire.

  3. Vale

  He had been freed. He had been given the gift of knowing his destiny and final duty. His captivity was over. His mission was glory and flame. His heart leapt, so consumed with violent joy that his body could barely contain it. His limbs were infused with an energy that he hadn’t felt since the forced landing. He wondered that his feet touched the floor of the hold at all. He was flying. Suddenly there was wind. There had to be. He could feel it whipping past his face as he bore down on the orks and the ship. The greenskins weren’t aware of his approach. He almost laughed. The eye of the Emperor was upon him as he ran towards his apotheosis, and it rendered him unstoppable. He could tear the orks apart with his hands, but the Emperor’s fire was coming for them.

  One of the orks spotted him and shouted. The others turned and reached for their weapons. Now Vale did laugh.

  At his back, his allies opened fire. One ork dropped, his throat torn out by a well-placed round. The other two shot back, yelling as they did so. Vale saw another ork round the nose of the Inflexible at a run. He crashed to the ground, head blown apart.

  Something brutally hard, round and burning cold slammed into Vale’s left thigh. He glared in outrage at the ork who had shot him. His leg lost its strength. His sprint broke down into a hopping limp. Fractal pain shook his frame, radiating out from the wound. The final metres to the lighter stretched. He clenched his teeth and hauled the dead leg forward. When he put weight on it, the world flared white. He bit his tongue, and blood poured down his chin.

  Three more steps. The other two orks died. There were many more coming. The hold was in uproar. Orks were firing at the Inflexible, at Yarrick’s position, at Vale. The shots were still scattered. There were still precious seconds before the orks made their numbers felt.

  He reached the Inflexible. The canopy was open. He hauled himself up the ladder left by the orks and kicked it away as he dropped himself into the cockpit. A few seconds more, and the canopy lowered as he powered up. He killed the fuel line to the starboard engine. Not yet, he thought. The port engine whined with pent-up rage. He checked the weapons. Still present, still active.

  The pain in his leg had numbed. Something worse than pain spread from the wound: a lethargic, creeping darkness. ‘Not yet,’ Vale muttered, tongue thick, breath hissing. He looked to port. The others had left their cover and were running for the opening in the wall.

  The darkness spread down his arms to his hands and fingers, leeching strength and dexterity. His vision dulled to a grainy, grey tunnel. No more time. Now, he thought. His hands did nothing. Night was falling behind his eyes. He found a last cry. ‘Now!’ he howled, and hands responded.

  The Inflexible lurched forwards. Vale changed the vector of the thrust. Now he let promethium flood into the starboard engine.

  No more darkness. Only light and heat and pain, and seconds of the most awful, sublime joy he had ever known.

  Chapter Eight

  The Run

  1. Yarrick

  A phoenix rose behind us. It shrieked justice at the heavens as it filled the hold with the hell of its birth.

  We had barely reached the opening when the Inflexible began its final strike. I paused as the others ran down the narrow, upended corridor. I looked back to bear witness to Vale’s sacrifice. The lighter lifted off th
e ground, climbing vertically. It kept climbing even as it burst into flame. At the same moment, its lascannon fired and its Hellfury missiles launched. The air of the hold was redolent with spent fuel and carelessly spilled flammable materials. The missiles slammed into other ships. The Inflexible spun wildly in the air, still firing the lascannon as it transformed into a fireball. It hung in the air another few seconds before it smashed into the deck. It crushed. It incinerated. Fire rushed through the space of the hold with the roar of a hurricane. It drowned out the screams of the burning orks. It grew into a towering wave of fire, and now I ran.

  There was a wind in the corridor as air was sucked into the inferno. I had almost left it too late. Heat followed at my heels, carrying the promise of burning death. The passageway ended at a T intersection. I broke left. Behind me, there was a roaring, as if one of the Inflexible’s engines had entered the corridor. Just ahead, the others waited for me on the other side of a bulkhead. I leapt through. Trower and Bekket slid a steel door shut. With the ship’s new orientation, they had to lift it up rather than pull to the side, but they managed to close and latch the heavy steel before the flames reached it. The barrier became warm to the touch within seconds, and we moved on quickly.

  Polis led the way again. I was relying heavily on the little man, and he was rewarding my trust. He was a prodigy. Given time, luck and room for error, we would eventually have found our way to the temple without his help. It was so huge, it was the one destination on the space hulk that could always be found. But we would not have made such good time, and in such relative safety. His fear was a boon. At the slightest noise, some of which only he could hear, he would change route. Whether all of the threats we avoided were real or not, he was keeping us out of unnecessary engagements, saving our striking power for when we reached our goal. His sense of direction was uncanny. Wherever possible, he took us out of the corridors and into the networks of ventilation shafts, crawl spaces, access hatchways, and all the myriad byways of a voidship’s circulatory system. No matter how many times the path twisted, no matter how many branches we took, he always knew where we were. We made good progress. Whenever we passed a viewing block, I saw that we were drawing closer.

  We were very close, and crawling through the abandoned guts of a freighter. We were slick with grease, feeling our way through the dark over coiled pipes, fragmented gears that could slice off a finger if touched too suddenly, and funnels like cathedral bells. ‘We need to reach the top,’ I whispered to Polis. ‘Can you get us there?’

  ‘No,’ he said, then repeated himself, becoming his own stuttering echo: ‘Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-no. No connecting structures, commissar. It’s isolated.’ His muttering moved off-subject and rasped against the blind metal shapes.

  ‘Then how do the orks have access?’

  ‘Below.’ Echo: ‘B’low-b’low-b’low.’

  I realised that we had been crawling along a downward slope. After another few minutes, the iron beneath my hand gave way to cold stone. For the space of a twitch, I was back in the well. But there was no water, and gradually the slope levelled off. Then we could stand, and the way ahead of us was showing grey. There was a light source not too far away.

  We were in a tunnel beneath the surface of the planetoid. Once more, I was astounded by the discipline necessary to have orks take the trouble to create a stable, breathable atmosphere down here. I would have thought they lacked the patience to pull off such a feat of engineering. You also never imagined being outmanoeuvred on the battlefield, I thought.

  The tunnel was part of a network of intersecting caves. We were moving through a high-ceilinged warren, one that would take orks quickly from one sector of the space hulk to another. Now it would deliver us into the heart of the construct. There were no more shafts or crawl spaces for us. We had to travel the same routes as the orks, and every second increased our risk of being discovered. So we ran. We ran to keep ahead of our luck, and we ran to fulfil our duty.

  We were fast, but our luck still caught us. We flew across an intersection. Trower, who was bringing up the rear, shouted a warning at the same moment as the greenskins snarled and started firing. We ran harder, and Polis tried to shake the pursuit by taking what seemed like random choices at the next few junctions. It wasn’t enough. I could hear the pounding of boots coming closer, the sound bouncing off the stone like hammer blows.

  We went around a sharp bend to the left, and I paused. ‘They must be stopped,’ I said. ‘Slowed, at the very least.’ They would catch us in the next minute, otherwise, and if they didn’t, their uproar would draw other patrols down on our heads.

  Bekket turned back to the bend and crouched. Trower joined him. He remained standing. He would shoot over Bekket’s head, and they could provide each other with some degree of covering fire. ‘We thank you for the honour, commissar,’ Bekket said.

  ‘You will be remembered,’ I promised them.

  The rest of us ran on. Behind us, I heard gunfire. First the isolated reports of Bekket and Trower’s guns, then the rain of counter-fire from the orks. The two men wouldn’t last long, but every moment they gained us was precious. The echoes turned their shouts of defiance into the battle-cry of a regiment. Their screams, when they came a couple of minutes later, were even greater.

  Polis had taken us through several more tunnel crossings by then. Trower and Bekket had played their part. So, by the Emperor’s grace, would we all.

  2. Rogge

  He had abandoned them. Not a blink, not a pause, just a quick commending of their souls to the Emperor, and then off. Rogge fought the urge to vomit. His skin was prickling with fear and horror. He didn’t know who held the greater terror for him now, between Yarrick and the orks. They were almost the same thing, just machines of senseless death. He ran with the rest of the party because he was caught in Yarrick’s undertow, and there were no other options open to him.

  No options yet. For the first time, the idea of surrender occurred to him. The orks had kept him alive once. They might do so again. They would be short a few slaves. The idea didn’t horrify him the way it should have, the way it once would have, before he had seen the truth of Sebastian Yarrick. There was no honour in following a madman, or dishonour in turning his face from him.

  There was no dishonour in staying alive.

  But the madness still held him as they ran through the warren of stone. The walls were damp and cold. Some of the tunnels were natural formations, while many more bore signs of having been hewn by the slaves. Here and there were the bones of captives who had been left to rot where they fell, their remains gradually trodden to dust. Enough traces remained to show there had been men here, men who had been forced to give up their lives for glory of the ork warlord. More glory. More senselessness.

  Thraka and Yarrick deserve each other, Rogge thought.

  The tunnel they took now ran straight and up. They had left the sounds of the greenskin patrol behind, but there were other noises ahead. Polis slowed, and whispered something to Yarrick. The commissar nodded. While Polis huddled close to Castel, Yarrick and Behriman took the lead. None of them glanced his way, and Rogge felt warring impulses of relief and resentment. He fought them both down and moved up to learn the worst.

  The tunnel sloped up sharply for the last few metres, ending in a jumble of boulders at the entrance to a large, echoing cave. Rogge had to crawl his way forward. Polis was curled up a length back from the opening, keeping within the comfort of full shadow. His eyes glittered with terror, but he still clutched his gun, and he was still looking ahead, waiting to be given his orders of martyrdom. Yarrick, Behriman and Castel were crouched behind the last line of boulders. As Rogge joined them, Castel gave him a look. Her contempt was clear and cold and precise. How does she know? he thought. And then: Know what? There’s nothing to know. He looked away, suddenly finding it quite easy to stare straight ahead, and learn his fate.

  The cavern was a natural one
. It extended about a hundred metres to the left, right and forward of the entrance. The ceiling was invisible in the gloom, but Rogge guessed it must have been at least twenty metres up. Off to the right, a smaller tunnel dropped into darkness. There was a large squad of orks milling about, guarding the far wall. This one was not stone. It was metal. It was part of one of the hulls used in the construction of the temple. There was an entrance here, and it wasn’t original to the ship, nor was it an improvised breach. It was an actual gate, festooned with crude ork faces, jaws agape in roars or laughter.

  After a minute’s observation, Yarrick and his two acolytes pulled back to where Polis hid. Rogge followed, dreading what was about to be decided.

  ‘Can we fight them?’ Castel whispered.

  Yarrick shook his head. ‘Too many.’

  Behriman said, ‘We need to draw some of them off.’

  Yarrick nodded slowly. He almost seemed reluctant. ‘You realise…’ he began.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  Polis uncurled with a snap. He sat bolt upright, staring at Yarrick and Behriman. His lips moved, shaping the cascade of silent words. He arrested them long enough to speak. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My mission is accomplished. I am expendable.’ And then he was up and scrambling over the boulders.

  Castel stood up a mere beat behind him. ‘Commissar,’ she said, ‘make them suffer dearly.’

  ‘I swear it,’ he answered.

  She took off after Polis.

  Drawn to the spectacle of mad self-sacrifice, Rogge moved forward behind Yarrick and Behriman. They paused at the entrance to the cavern. Rogge saw everything. He saw the insanity of blind faith. Polis ran through the cavern, shouting its dimensions and numbering the days of his captivity. He fired his gun, but hit nothing. He did draw the orks’ attention. They didn’t react at first, staring dumfounded at the lunatic human. Polis was halfway across the cavern toward the other tunnel before one of them moved. While its kin laughed, the greenskin came up behind Polis. It had its cleaver drawn. It hauled its arm back.