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‘Everything fell apart,’ muttered Arvo.
‘So, do you?’ asked Zanne with disarming directness. ‘Do you understand?’
Arvo’s brow creased. He took a breath.
A sudden eruption of noise forestalled him. Familiar noise, the soundtrack of his old life. At first he thought it was in his head, another memory. Gunfire and voices raised in anger, fear and pain – and explosions. He could see from Zanne’s face that she heard it too. In the distance, but rapidly approaching: the sound of war.
Arvo reached by reflex for a gun that wasn’t there. He clung to the haft of his pickaxe instead, rising from his crouch.
Most of the overseers had also drawn weapons and were headed towards the disturbance. Their leader, Corporal Maxtell, remained. ‘Ignore it,’ he barked at his nervous labourers, spraying spittle. ‘Whatever is happening is no business of yours and no excuse for shirking. This gang will meet its end-of-shift quotas or I’ll take the difference out of your hides!’
‘Sir, I can help,’ Arvo spoke up. ‘I–’
He felt Zanne’s elbow in his ribs and bit his tongue. She was right. It would be unwise to reveal his secret. A glowering servitor was pushing its way towards him. He did as he was told and returned to work – though not for long.
The war with all its noise and fury crashed into them.
It began with a single running figure, spitting profanities over his shoulder. A black-and-purple cultist’s cloak was slung over his grey labourer’s coveralls. Maxtell fired. He missed, but a lasgun beam from behind blew out the traitor’s knee. He fell in a spray of bone fragments and blood to lie in gasping, twitching agony.
The corporal bowed to the inevitable, yelling to his gang to retreat but keep hold of their tools. Arvo kept a tight grip on his axe. More cultists burst onto the scene, and he stepped to greet them. Not expecting resistance from a simple labourer, they ran into his bludgeoning attack.
They were everywhere, suddenly, stinking shadows emerging from the half-light, seeking human shields to hide behind. One made a grab for Zanne and earned Arvo’s pick through his skull.
Muzzles flashed. Arvo saw Maxtell cut down as he dived for cover. He pulled Zanne down behind a half-demolished wall. One of the gang’s lumen units was shot out, followed swiftly by the other.
Parius Interior Guard troops, including some of Arvo’s overseers, were hard on the cultists’ heels. Their lasgun and luminator beams criss-crossed in the darkness. Voices yelled to the labourers to flatten themselves on their stomachs, but many were held captive or just too panicked to comply. The soldiers, having given fair warning, were not reticent about shooting any shadow that moved.
Zanne had curled into a trembling ball. ‘There are only a few of them,’ Arvo whispered to her reassuringly. ‘A dozen, at most. This is not a planned attack. They have been smoked out of some bolthole and are on the defensive.’
They’re doing as much damage as they can, he could have added but chose not to, one last howl of rage before they die. He recalled what Zanne had said: We build, the traitors and the monsters come along and knock everything down, and we have to build again.
‘Stay down.’
Arvo knew his surroundings. By instinct, he had committed every detail of them to memory. He also knew where each cultist had been when the lights went out. He edged out from behind the half-wall, keeping low to reduce the risk of friendly fire. Some of the cultists could be pinpointed by their gibbering and shrieking. They were sending entreaties to their vile deity. Arvo strained to block out the actual words. Words could be dangerous.
He came up behind a likely shadow. He slipped his axe haft around its throat and strangled him with it. The cultist had no time to squeal. The fight left his limbs and he dropped. Arvo was already seeking out his next target.
A knot of figures crouched behind a barricade of promethium barrels – empty, thank the Emperor. They had two guns between them. Their wielder’s faces, twisted by insanity, lit up with each shot taken. In those flashes, Arvo identified two other figures as cultists, four more as cringing hostages.
Stealing up to the group, he interposed himself among them. Only one cultist saw him, shooting him a suspicious glare. Arvo dropped his gaze as if cowed; just one more hostage. The cultist, he saw, was not quite as unarmed as he had appeared to be. He was wearing a belt hung with grey metal eggs, at least four of them. Krak grenades.
He was muttering to himself, as if building his resolve. One last howl of rage before they die. In these urban surroundings, with so many innocents, he would cause devastation. Arvo had no choice. He lunged at the bomber, driving a fist into his stomach. It took two more punches to extinguish the fervour in his eyes. By then, his fellow decadents were alert to the enemy among them.
Arvo snatched a grenade and rounded on them. They weren’t quite ready to die yet, after all. They shrank from him, for a second, long enough for him to tackle the closest of them. He wrenched the cultist around into another’s sights as he fired. The cultist stiffened in Arvo’s arms and he threw the body into the others, at the same time wrenching the lasgun from its deathly grip.
The gun was local issue, lighter than Arvo was accustomed to. It felt good to hold it, all the same; like an extension of his self. His hands had felt empty for too long. He gunned down the remaining two cultists, unskilled combatants, with ease. Another ran up behind him, betraying his approach with a fanatical roar, and he spun – not fast enough to bring his gun to bear, but in time to snap his attacker’s jaw with its butt, driving bone through muscle.
A wave of concussive force blew him over. Arvo heard the explosion a fraction of a second later. He stayed down as flaming debris rained upon him. Another bomber! The blast had come from – he couldn’t get his bearings – his right. Where he had left Zanne.
He rolled to put out any flames before they took hold. Smoke was smothering his oxygen, making him miss his gas mask, blinding him further – but concealing him too. A cultist, with his back to Arvo, strafed the shadows with a lasgun indiscriminately. Arvo, in contrast, squeezed his trigger only once, punching through his target’s head.
Sensing movement to his left, he snapped his gun around. An Interior Guard trooper had him in his sights. Nice work, thought Arvo. He lowered his weapon and gestured to show he was an ally. The soldier held his fire. He motioned to Arvo to get down on the ground anyway. Arvo complied. ‘Thank you for your service, citizen,’ the soldier grunted as he took the lasgun from beside him. ‘We’ll take it from here.’
Arvo waited, but seethed impatiently.
There couldn’t have been many cultists standing. He had downed at least half of them himself, while the bombing had surely taken out more. Still, long minutes passed – interspersed with brief but violent outbreaks of shouting, scuffling and gunshots – before calm was restored. Then a lumen unit had to be found and kicked into sputtering action. Interior Guard troopers swept the area, prodding at every prostrate body, alive or dead, in search of enemies in hiding.
At last, the survivors, the innocent labourers in Arvo’s gang, were given leave to stand. Doubtless next would come the order to return to work, as soon as Maxtell’s replacement was established. In the meantime, they had a precious moment to process what had happened, deal with their shock and count their dead.
Some attacked their tormentors’ bodies, hacking them with blunt tools or tearing them apart with bare hands. It was a pointless kind of revenge, other than to vent their misery and frustration. Nobody tried to stop them. Arvo made straight for the wall behind which he had left Zanne.
The wall had been sundered in the explosion.
Zanne’s pale hand protruded from the debris as if she had fought her fate. As if she had tried to claw her way to freedom before the breath was crushed out of her. He took the hand between his own. It was cold. He had seen so many deaths in his short life, he told himself, so very many. Why did t
his one feel different?
Why was her life worth more than other lives?
So, do you? He recalled the very last thing Zanne had said to him. Do you understand? Her last question. Arvo answered her aloud, as if there was a chance she might hear him. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I understand now.’
The sky was split by the shrieks of Imperial engines.
Sergeant Jarvan looked up, shielding his eyes, as the first ships hit Parius’ atmosphere, blazing gloriously. He shifted his gaze to the vast, straight lines of humanity stretched across the newly cleared assembly terrace on Hive Opus’ upper tier, and his chest swelled with pride.
He almost wished he was travelling to the stars with them. Almost.
Of course, their departure would leave the labour gangs shorthanded, but this couldn’t be helped. Parius Monumentus’ tithe to the Imperium was due and no allowance could be made for recent losses. The labourers who remained would just have to work harder, until their population was replenished.
Jarvan hadn’t witnessed the tithing ceremony before. He had just been promoted – for the second time in less than four months – after his predecessor was killed in a bombing attack. He strode along the endless ranks of young men, pausing to question some. He asked their names and how they felt about being chosen to fight for the Emperor, to which all but one professed to being suitably honoured.
That one gave his name as Arvo. The name, along with his pale, dull-eyed face, almost sparked a flicker of recognition in Jarvan. ‘Begging your pardon, sergeant,’ said the new recruit, ‘but I was chosen to fight a long time ago.’
Jarvan checked Arvo’s name on his data-slate. ‘So I see. The last draft overlooked you, so this time you volunteered for service. You achieved the highest scores of your intake in your selection tests – the best scores I have ever seen, in fact.’
‘I know my life’s purpose now,’ said Arvo.
Jarvan raised an eyebrow. ‘Pray tell?’
‘I was bred to fight and to die for Him.’
‘An admirable attitude.’
‘I shall face the Emperor’s enemies, therefore, without fear or doubt. I shall exchange this life He has granted me for the greatest possible advantage to Him. If I can only advance His cause in the slightest, then I shall consider my brief existence worthwhile. I shall do my duty – for what else is there, after all?’
‘What indeed?’ Jarvan smiled approvingly. He clasped his hands behind his back and moved on.
The first of the dropships was coming in to land, to gather up its complement of soon-to-be-martyrs. Jarvan had forgotten most of their names already, but he would remember one name for a time, at least – along with the question he had posed. The sergeant repeated it to himself in a thoughtful mutter.
‘Yes. What else is there, indeed?’
About the Author
Steve Lyons’ work in the Warhammer 40,000 universe includes the novellas Engines of War and Angron’s Monolith, the Imperial Guard novels Ice World and Dead Men Walking – now collected in the omnibus Honour Imperialis – and the audio dramas Waiting Death and The Madness Within. He has also written numerous short stories and is currently working on more tales from the grim darkness of the far future.
Discover more tales of the glorious Astra Militarum in this omnibus edition of three novels and three short stories showcasing the true heroes of the Imperium: the humble Guardsmen.
A Black Library Publication
Published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Death Korps of Krieg illustration by Mark Holmes.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-705-4
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