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  Left for Dead – Steve Lyons

  About the Author

  A Black Library Publication

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  Left for Dead

  Steve Lyons

  The war on Parius Monumentus was over.

  Hive Opus had been pried from the claws of depravity, thank the Emperor! Blessed order was finally restored.

  The Astra Militarum could claim the victory. The local militia, chronically undermanned, had misjudged the spread of corruption; it had overtaken and overwhelmed them, forcing them to transmit an astropathic distress call.

  A Death Korps of Krieg regiment had arrived to take control, and for a full month, day and night, the sky had flashed and thundered to the relentless beat of their siege guns. The city’s walls had shuddered and inexorably crumbled. Its decadent captors had been put to flight – and then, most of them, to the sword.

  The Korpsmen had departed, with other wars on other worlds to fight. Silence had settled in their wake – only long enough for the Emperor’s loyal subjects to breathe a collective prayer of relief. Then the real work had begun.

  The sky now resounded with the roars of construction vehicles. The shattered debris of habs and factorums groaned beneath the weight of caterpillar tracks. The gilt-edged finery of the city’s cathedrals, reduced to fragments, was shovelled away by claw blades. Exposed guts of great mining machines spat and hissed and touched off fires.

  Jarvan was a corporal in the Parius Interior Guard.

  He was new to the rank since his predecessor had been captured and butchered by the enemy, and was eager to prove himself. He had charge of a labour gang, one of thousands: just under a hundred weary and traumatised civilians charged with sifting through the wreckage, recovering what they could. Whip-wielding servitors stood over them, encouraging them in these duties.

  Thus it was that Corporal Jarvan encountered the stranger.

  His labour gang was dragging bodies from a fallen hab-block. They had found a number of survivors yesterday; not quite so many today. Tomorrow, they would be reassigned to a higher priority area. Power was yet to be restored to this hive sector. Freestanding lumen units coughed and sputtered out sprays of pale white light, between which lurked brooding shadows.

  Jarvan turned his head at just the moment to see a shape flitting through those shadows. One with no right to be there. He snapped up his rifle with its flashlight attachment, pinpointing the figure of a man.

  His skin was pale, as with any lower-level hive-dweller deprived of direct sunlight. He was young and wiry, with a military buzz cut. Jarvan’s eyes were immediately drawn to the lasgun in his hand, though the stranger wasn’t aiming it.

  ‘Drop the weapon! Drop it! Down on your knees. Lace your hands behind your head.’ The stranger complied with each instruction in turn.

  ‘Identify yourself,’ the corporal demanded.

  The stranger didn’t answer. He knelt, staring at Jarvan with dull eyes, unblinking. Jarvan thought he might be a soldier. He had the build and bearing of one, but no uniform. He wore a set of shapeless grey coveralls, singed, tattered and soiled.

  ‘Identify yourself,’ repeated Jarvan. ‘Name and rank?’

  ‘Don’t remember,’ said the stranger, the words catching in his throat.

  Drawing closer, Jarvan saw that the stranger’s head was cut. Blood had crusted around the wound and striped his cheek. He was probably concussed. The corporal motioned to the nearest of his labourers; he hadn’t bothered to remember their names or faces. He sent three of them to strip the stranger and search him.

  He didn’t resist.

  One labourer brought the stranger’s weapon to Jarvan. At a glance, he could see that it wasn’t Parius issue. He had seen enough like it in recent weeks, however. The lasgun was modified to fire a more powerful shot, but at a cost. Extra sink rings had been fitted around its barrel to bleed off excess heat. It bore the stamp of the Imperial forges on Lucius, which made it Krieg property.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  The stranger didn’t answer him. His eyes remained fixed upon Jarvan as the labourers ran calloused hands over him, searching for tattoos or mutations. They reported that the stranger was clean – and one of them had found his ident papers. At the corporal’s impatient urging, he read out the details haltingly.

  ‘His name is, uh, Arvo, sir. Registered to… this sector. He’s a menial, third-grade.’

  Jarvan was almost disappointed. So much fuss, he thought, for a maintenance drudge. He must have taken the lasgun from a fallen trooper. Likely had no idea how to use it. Jarvan was inclined to shoot him on the spot and save a medicae’s time and effort.

  He lowered his rifle instead, crouching to inspect the stranger’s eyes. Clear enough, he judged. He straightened up, beckoning to his labourers again. ‘Take him to the medicae and be swift about it. Back in twenty minutes or I’ll have you both flogged.’ More than enough time had been wasted on distractions. He had no intention of missing his end-of-shift quotas.

  The stranger was hauled out of Corporal Jarvan’s sight and, almost as quickly, faded from his thoughts.

  The medicae facility was no quieter than anywhere else. The air buzzed with urgent shouts, rushing footsteps and the howls and screams and dying gurgles of the untended wounded.

  In fact, the word ‘facility’ over-dignified this place: a makeshift camp strewn between the cranes and hoists of a broken-down factorum. A hundred drudges scrubbed the walls, only gradually eroding centuries of ingrained soot. Their mops swirled fresher vomit and blood around the floor. Haggard medics stumbled between them, red-eyed and dishevelled, urgent pleas pulling them in all directions.

  The man known as Arvo was dumped on a creaking gurney. He lay on his back and let the clamour wash over him. It merged with the ringing in his head to deny him the sleep he sorely needed. He breathed in the stench of infected and diseased bodies. Occasionally, he slipped into a fitful doze, to be woken by a gunshot. For many of his fellow patients, it appeared, a bullet to the brain was the most efficient treatment.

  For hours, only two people showed Arvo any attention. The first was an Administratum clerk who checked his papers, tapped his details into a data-slate, clicked his tongue to himself and moved away. The second was a middle-aged woman, dripping piously with religious symbols, who searched him as the labourers at the hab-block had searched him, for signs of Chaos corruption.

  In between these interruptions, his mind fled to the recent past.

  Hive Opus had been split open, its cannons silenced. The Death Korps had risen from their trenches and surged forwards. They were strafed with small-arms fire, to no avail. For every skull-masked figure cut down, two more appeared to replace him. Their advance continued, unstoppable. A tidal wave of screaming madness.

  Their enemies were worshippers of excess, wanton revellers in carnal pleasure. They possessed not a fraction of the Korpsmen’s iron discipline. In the face of the Emperor’s holy vengeance, they broke. Holes gaped open within the cultists’ masses, into which the Korpsmen poured and widened them with guns, combat knives and the strength of their own sinews.

  Arvo’s head rang to each beat of the battle. His ears had been deadened, his eyes flash-blinded by a bursting grenade. The stink of blood and fire, cordite and death assailed his nostrils. He lay on his stomach in the dirt, pinned down. Blood crawled, hot and sticky, down his right cheek.

  His vision was beginning to clear, though it was still blurred. Shapes shifted around him, through a thickening smoke haze. He must have briefly lost consciousness as the battlefront had passed over him. Death Korpsmen
surrounded him, encased in flak armour and heavy greatcoats. Their boots pulverised the debris beside his head.

  How inhuman they looked, he thought, with their faces concealed behind rebreather masks so that even their eyes were hidden. From this lowly vantage point, he couldn’t tell one from another.

  They must have seen him, in turn, but no one came to help him. Why would they? He was nothing but a stranger to them too – and each Korpsman was looking for a clear shot at the enemy, through the crush of his comrades before him, following an imperative drilled into him from birth. Pushing forward, ever forward.

  Then, minutes, hours or days had passed, and they were gone.

  Arvo barely remembered dragging himself to his feet, throwing off the hunks of masonry that had piled up on his back. He found himself, for the very first time in his life, alone. He had clung to his lasgun throughout his ordeal, so hard the fingers of his right hand had seized up around its trigger guard.

  His mask had been knocked askew. The rebreather unit on his chest was dented and inoperative. He shucked off his coat and discarded his broken equipment. The air was unpleasant, but at least it wasn’t toxic, not like the air of his birth world. Not like Krieg.

  The man who would be known as Arvo held his mask in his gloved hands. He stared at the reflection of a face he didn’t recognise in its blank, skull-eye sockets and an unfamiliar thought, an unworthy thought, occurred to him.

  He was free.

  Arvo was yanked back to the present, and to his makeshift sickbed.

  A medicae squinted at him through an augmetic eyepiece. He clicked his fingers at a servitor, which trundled over. It brought up a heavy hypodermic arm, inside which serum-filled tubes cycled until one locked into place. The servitor thrust a huge needle into Arvo’s stomach and a chemical bolt dulled his pain and tiredness, sharpening his mind.

  ‘Discharged,’ the medicae grunted, turning away from him.

  Arvo called after him, ‘No, wait. Where do I go?’

  ‘No further treatment necessary. Discharged.’ The medicae hovered over another patient, presenting his back to Arvo. ‘Full recovery impossible. Termination advised,’ he pronounced in this case, and moved on.

  Arvo climbed off the gurney. The moment his feet touched the floor, a pair of drudges deposited an unconscious woman in his place. Their downcast eyes avoided his and he chose not to question them. He was wary of asking too many questions. He took his papers – rather, Arvo’s papers – from his pocket. He found an address on them. A hab? It wasn’t clear. He had never known such a thing.

  Other discharged patients were joining a line. It stretched from a desk at which a middle-aged man worked unhurriedly. Arvo followed the line out of the building, halfway around a city block. He eavesdropped as someone else asked what the line was for and was told ‘habitation and labour assignments.’

  He took his place at the back of the line and waited.

  He spoke only once, when someone behind him grumbled that his sprained ankle hadn’t been bandaged. ‘The Emperor gives us all we need,’ snapped Arvo, ‘and resources must be managed.’ He regretted abandoning his depleted medi-kit along with his uniform. He could have sterilised his head wound.

  ‘Name and ident number?’ asked the desk clerk, three hours later.

  He thumbed a data-slate, nodding occasionally to himself. Arvo waited, half-expecting the clerk to uncover his deception as soon as he looked up and saw his face.

  ‘Your hab-sector has been condemned, I see. I’m assigning you to a shelter and a labour gang.’ The clerk took the stub of a pencil to Arvo’s papers, made and initialled some amendments, and slid them back across the desk. He didn’t glance at Arvo at all. Checking his wrist chrono, he said, ‘Your first work shift begins at twenty-six-hundred hours. The time now is twenty-four-eighteen. Next!’

  Public vehicles were leaving the medicae camp all the time, dispersing ex-patients across the sprawling, multi-layered city. Now Arvo knew what was expected of him, he acted accordingly. Among the bleary-eyed crowd, he located six others bound for his sector and an Interior Guard groundcar and driver to take them there.

  Arvo rode on the fender as they snaked their way through burning industrial blocks and around impassable thoroughfares. He drank in the sounds, sights and smells of a world unlike any he had seen before, a world that few of his kind would ever see: a broken world, for sure, but a world – for the moment – at peace. Arvo’s new world.

  The girl watched Arvo for four days before she dared approach him.

  Her labour gang, now his gang too, was excavating a collapsed grain store. Their Interior Guard overseer had impressed upon them the import of this task. Emergency supplies had been requested from the closest agri world, but thousands could starve waiting for them.

  Arvo had one of the larger tools: a pickaxe. He was shattering the biggest, most intractable hunks of debris so that others could scoop them up with shovels. The girl had a shovel and had worked her way closer to him.

  As soon as she was allowed, she took a beaker of water to him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name is Zanne.’

  He responded with a disinterested grunt. He swung his axe, shattered stone, hefted the axe again. He didn’t take the water from her. She had rarely seen Arvo talking to anyone else. This had been by choice to begin with. Having been rebuffed, however, his fellow labourers now tended to shun him.

  ‘Your name is Arvo,’ Zanne persisted. ‘I heard the overseer say so.’

  ‘Yes,’ he allowed. ‘My name is Arvo.’

  ‘And you’re from Hab-Sector Kappa-Two-Phi. I used to live there.’

  Arvo swung his axe, shattered stone, hefted the axe again.

  ‘How did you get so strong?’

  This question fazed him, just a little, interrupting his rhythm.

  ‘I think you’re the strongest in our gang,’ Zanne told him. He was, in fact, easily the best and most tireless worker among them. She didn’t think the servitors had ever had to whip him. The others often talked about him in resentful tones because he made them look idle, more deserving of the lash in comparison.

  ‘The work is good,’ Arvo grunted.

  Zanne was surprised. ‘You enjoy it?’

  ‘It is good to build, to improve things rather than destroy them.’

  She considered that statement, chewing on her lower lip. ‘Yes,’ she agreed at length, ‘I suppose it is.’

  A servitor wheeled its ponderous frame their way. Quickly, Zanne dropped to her knees and began to shovel again. She set Arvo’s beaker down beside him. ‘You should drink it,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t know when there’ll be more. This is good water too, hardly any slime in it. Some days, there is none at all.’

  Arvo looked at her for the first time. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Zanne proudly. ‘Ten and three-quarters, really, but I’ve been looking after myself since I was six.’

  ‘What happened to your…?’ He struggled to find the right word.

  ‘My parents? I don’t remember my dad. He died when I was a little girl. They said it was a monster that got loose in the mines. Then Mum was ill and I had to look after her. I had to work to earn food for us to eat. But she died too.’

  ‘The illness took her?’

  Zanne shook her head.

  ‘The cultists, then?’

  ‘She was in our hab-block when it collapsed. The blasphemers were hiding in there, you see, so the soldiers had to–’

  Arvo’s eyes narrowed. A muscle in his cheek twitched. ‘The soldiers killed her?’

  ‘They had no choice. They had to stop the blasphemers. For the Emperor.’ Zanne spoke in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, as if relating something she had read in a book. Her life, she had always been taught, was what it was and there was no point being sad about that. Self-pity, in fact, was the very worst
kind of ingratitude.

  She was almost grateful for the hard work too. It kept her mind busy.

  Arvo pushed his untouched beaker towards her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You drink it.’

  He didn’t have to offer twice. Zanne downed the quenching water in one gulp. The servitor, it transpired, was still watching her; she felt its lash across her shoulders for taking more than her share, but it was worth it. What was one more stripe to add to all the others? She wiped her lips on her filthy, ragged sleeve.

  ‘I did not mean to get you in trouble,’ Arvo mumbled, once the servitor’s attention was safely elsewhere again.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Zanne assured him.

  ‘We have our orders,’ said Arvo stiffly, ‘and we must follow them.’

  Between work shifts, they ate, slept and did little else, alongside a thousand others in a designated refugee shelter.

  The building had been a chapel, but was desecrated beyond hope of salvation. Wooden pews had been hacked to pieces, stained-glass windows shattered. Blood and faeces had been scrubbed from the walls but had left a lingering pungent scent – while the outlines of spray-painted blasphemies endured.

  Arvo collected his ration of gruel that night and, as always, consumed it sitting cross-legged on his blanket. Tonight, for the first time, someone joined him. He didn’t object to Zanne’s presence, though again it was left to her to break the silence.

  ‘Do you have any family?’ she asked him.

  Arvo shook his head.

  ‘What, never? But you must have. There must have been someone. Everyone has a mum and a dad, even if they never–’

  Arvo interrupted her angrily. ‘I had no one. Nothing. Just a…’ He checked himself, as if regretting his candour. He sighed. ‘I do not belong here.’

  Zanne longed to ask what he meant by that. She had had her first glimpse behind the stranger’s façade, however, and feared what else she might unleash. She summoned her courage anyway. She had never met anyone unlike herself before; she wanted to know everything about him. But as she opened her mouth, her moment was stolen.