Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  She had dropped her fork, cupped a hand over her face. She was making herself look small in her seat, trying not to be noticed. In a stage whisper, she directed Gunthar’s gaze: ‘Two tables behind me. To the right. No, my right. That man, the one in blue, with the beard and the bald spot. Is he looking this way?’

  Gunthar shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘I think we’ve met. Some reception at the High Spire. He was, I don’t know, a proctor commissioner, something like that. Are you sure he’s not looking at me?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Gunthar. ‘He’s just eating his meal. It’s dark in here. That’s why I brought you here, for the privacy. I can hardly make out his face. I’m sure he can’t have recognised you, from the back, from a single meeting.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m imagining things.’ Arex dared a glance over her shoulder, and her round face softened with relief. ‘Of course it’s not him. What would a man like him be doing somewhere like this?’

  Something in Arex’s tone, the derisive emphasis she put on those words, left Gunthar stung. ‘You’re here,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I’m incognito, remember?’ she said, lifting the fork again, twirling a length of borana root around it. ‘I don’t want to be found – and this is about the last place on Hieronymous Theta anyone would think to look for the Governor’s niece.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gunthar woodenly. ‘I expect you’re right.’

  They were right up near the top of one of Hieronymous City’s shorter towers, as high as Gunthar had ever climbed. The skyways outside had been hardly crowded, even at this time of the early evening. He had saved for weeks to afford the bribe that had got him past the doorman of this eatery. It was the first place he had been to that served real meat, not the synthetic stuff. There was room between the tables, and plenty of servitors, attentive to their customers’ every need.

  Still, it wasn’t enough. Arex was used to better than this, better than Gunthar, even since his promotion, could provide.

  ‘I’m sorry for being so jumpy,’ she said. ‘It’s just Uncle Hanrik. I can only imagine what he might do if he knew I was here, this far from home.’

  ‘I know,’ sighed Gunthar. ‘I know.’

  What had he been thinking, making plans, dreaming of a life with her? How could that have worked? They lived in different worlds – and Gunthar would never be welcome in Arex’s world, just as she could never be happy in his.

  He left the ring in its pocket.

  He insisted on seeing her home – as near as he could take her, anyway.

  There was still so much he wanted to say, so many questions to ask her. Why was she here? Was this only a game to her, these regular meetings? A thrilling adventure on the lower floors. Did she ever think about where it might lead? But Gunthar could feel the ring’s dead weight in his pocket, and he was still scared, scared of the answers she might give.

  They took an autocab towards the gubernatorial sector, but abandoned it a few hab-blocks away before the proctors could show too much interest in them.

  They talked about Gunthar’s work, and he found himself reeling off statistics, telling Arex about the annual yield in each of his mines until he was sure he was boring her. Not that she showed it. Arex was an expert at feigning interest. She had to be, someone in her position, all those dull official functions she had to attend.

  He remembered the function at which they had met, the opening of a refinery plant. Arex, backlit by the red glow of a pit of molten metal, laughing politely at something a shift manager had said to her. The twinkle in her green eyes. Her chestnut hair, bobbing on her shoulders. He remembered his first stumbling words to her, how she had just smiled and pretended he was making perfect sense.

  He remembered stumbling into her on a swaying metal gantry, choking on the hot, dry air, an awkward moment defused by Arex’s good humour and that smile again.

  Was she only feigning interest in him?

  They strolled between plasteel and glass towers on an expansive skyway, treading on the white chevrons that marked out the pedestrian lane as grimy, bubble-shaped autocabs hummed by to each side of them. There were fewer skyways up here, but fewer people to walk them too.

  ‘So,’ said Arex suddenly, ‘you’ve seen no… trouble? In the mines, I mean?’

  ‘Trouble?’ echoed Gunthar, instinctively on the alert. ‘No, nothing. Nothing like that. My men work hard, and yields are holding steady. What have you heard?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Arex quickly. ‘I was just… Something my uncle said, that’s all. He was talking to… well, I’m sure it was nothing, like you say. It doesn’t matter.’

  They were at a crossway, and Arex drew Gunthar towards a row of lifter cubicles. They found one empty, and stepped inside. Even up here, the lifters stank of human sweat and excrement, the legacies of their journeys below.

  ‘I shouldn’t…’ Gunthar stammered. ‘If you’re going back up to the High Spire, I should… This is as high as I can really…’

  ‘Who said I was going up?’ said Arex. She fingered the rune panel in the wall, and the cubicle door rattled and squealed shut behind them. A moment later, they were descending fast, and Gunthar thought Arex must have entered some private code to prevent the lifter from stopping for more passengers at the intervening levels.

  ‘I always drop a few floors, this close to home,’ she said. ‘There’s a place I can climb up, not far from the High Spire, where no one ever looks. It’s easier than trying to get past the proctor patrols and the pictcasters up above.’

  ‘We’re dropping more than a few floors,’ said Gunthar nervously.

  ‘Don’t be such a worrier,’ said Arex. ‘I thought you were born down here.’

  ‘Not this far down,’ squawked Gunthar, but she didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes were shining with excitement. This was an adventure for her.

  Gunthar was relieved when the lifter brought them to a jarring halt and a mechanical voice informed them that, should they wish to proceed further, they would need a high-level encryption key to return to this floor.

  ‘You shouldn’t listen to what they say,’ said Arex as the door rattled open and she and Gunthar emerged onto a teeming skyway far darker and dirtier than the one above. ‘It’s not so bad down here, once you get used to it. It’s a shame it’s so late. In the daytime, from those railings over there, you can see right down to the ground. We might see a campfire burning down there, even now, if you want to look.’

  Gunthar shook his head. The railings at the edge of this skyway were twisted, breached, and he feared that if he went too close he might be jostled off the edge.

  They elbowed their way through the crowds, attracting a few glances with their fine clothes but nothing more sinister, and Gunthar started to think that Arex was right. He had spent his life trying to escape from places like this, climbing those towers, but he couldn’t deny he felt at home here, far more so than he had in the eatery above. Down here, Gunthar was anonymous, just one more face. No one was likely to stop him, to ask him what he was doing so far from home. No one was likely to recognise the woman on his arm, or believe their eyes if they did.

  Gunthar felt safer down here.

  The emporiums were closed, heavy plasteel shutters slammed over their windows. A grizzled old man was doling out grey protein burgers from a filthy, open-topped cart. Nearby, the burnt-out shell of an autocab lay half on its side, wedged into the opening of a narrow alleyway. Globe-shaped luminators did their best to compensate for the fading light, but too many of them lay burnt out and broken.

  Gunthar and Arex had witnessed three fights. The proctors had moved in to break up one, but the participants, three young women and an elderly man, had seen them coming and melted into the accommodating crowd.

  ‘They don’t let you see this,’ said Arex, wistfully, ‘when you’re with the Governor. They pretend it doesn’t exist, but this
, right here, is Hieronymous Theta. This is the world we live in.’

  ‘I heard they might be connecting the skyways down here,’ said Gunthar, ‘sealing off the lower floors altogether.’

  ‘Burying our problems,’ said Arex, ‘but they’ll still be here. We can keep on climbing, until we reach the sun itself – but we’ve built our towers on rotten foundations, and they’ll drag us all down in time.’

  ‘This is still a new world, though,’ said Gunthar. ‘You’re talking about centuries from now. Millennia. We’ve still got time. The Emperor will provide.’

  Something was happening. Something had broken the patterns of the crowd, making them faltering and clumsy. An uncertain buzz was spreading, and building in volume. Another fight, thought Gunthar? No, something far bigger.

  Arex didn’t seem to have noticed the change in the atmosphere – or if she had, it didn’t bother her. She was marching onward, leading Gunthar towards what he now judged to be the epicentre of the disturbance. He cautioned her about this, but didn’t say too much because he didn’t want her to think of him as a coward. He asked himself what the heroes of the newsreels would do.

  Then the crowd before them parted, and Gunthar was faced with a monster.

  It was crouching with its back to a wide tunnel entrance. Its shoulders were hunched, its skin dry and yellowing like old parchment. Its spindly arms ended in gnarled claws, and its eyes were a bright and startling pink.

  Gunthar had seen mutants before, but only in pict-captures. Occasionally, one would find its way into the mines that he oversaw. He had dreamed of meeting one in the flesh, but in those dreams he had always had a gun or a chainsword, and the mutant had never been so big. In those dreams, Gunthar had been brave.

  A few game citizens had armed themselves with sticks and knives. They were taunting the mutant, which was hissing and spitting, slashing at them, holding them at bay. Gunthar saw a discarded stick on the ground, and he knew he ought to take it, do the Emperor’s work, beat this aberration to a bloody pulp. Be a hero.

  Then, one of the tormentors got too confident, stepped too close, and the mutant was upon him before Gunthar could blink. It tore out his throat with a feral snarl, showering itself in his blood. The victim’s last utterance in this world was a choked, gurgling scream – as, one by one, his erstwhile allies looked into the mutant’s crazed pink eyes, let their weapons fall from their numbed fingers and fled.

  Before he knew it, Gunthar was running too, feeling suddenly guilty that he hadn’t stopped to think about Arex, then grateful to find her running alongside him.

  They didn’t get far. Not nearly far enough.

  The crowd had become a panicked mob, pulling in all directions. Gunthar struggled against the ever-shifting tide, always aware of the horror that might have been closing behind him, expecting to feel those claws raking across his back. He wanted to scream, wanted to grab the people in his path and yell in their faces, ‘Not this way! The monster is this way!’ It was all he could do, though, to keep his own balance. He almost lost it twice, but Arex was there to catch him, to save his life. If either of them fell now, they were liable to be trampled or worse.

  A new sound joined the general discord, and Gunthar recognised the crack of lasgun fire. The proctors, at last, responding to the threat.

  Then he realised that the sound was coming not from behind him, but from somewhere ahead – from at least two directions at once – and a cold, tight knot formed in Gunthar’s stomach as he thought about what that had to mean.

  He grabbed Arex by the arm, halting her. ‘There are more of them,’ he cried. ‘The mutants. They’re everywhere!’

  They stared into each other’s frightened eyes, and somehow reached an unspoken consensus. They struck out in a new direction, away from the screaming, away from the gunfire, and just prayed to the Emperor that they weren’t rushing into more danger. Knowing that some mutants could almost pass for human, Gunthar suspected everyone who came near him, staring at them, searching for the slightest hint of deformity beneath each of their coats.

  He almost let out a shriek as a young woman stumbled into him – but it wasn’t an attack, she had just been knocked sideways by a surge of people. She scrabbled at Gunthar’s best grey tunic, trying to keep herself upright, and he reached out too late. The woman fell beneath his feet, and he could no longer help her.

  Someone was shouting orders, a harsh male voice augmented and distorted by a loudhailer. Almost instinctively, Gunthar and Arex modified their course to make for this sound of authority. Gunthar was flushed with relief as he saw the scarlet and purple uniforms of the Planetary Defence Force. The crowd was now flowing in a single direction, starting to thin out, and he was making some headway at last.

  The hailer was attached to an Armoured Response Vehicle, an ARV, broadcasting an appeal for a calm and orderly evacuation of the area. The vehicle was flanked by a score of foot soldiers, its fuel-burning engine pumping a noxious cloud of exhaust gases out behind it as it crawled up the narrow skyway.

  Arex pulled back, giving Gunthar’s hand an anxious squeeze. He knew why she was worried – but at that moment, he didn’t much care. He would rather they were both exposed, rather lose his job and his home and whatever else Governor Hanrik might choose to take from him than turn back and face the horrors behind him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘They aren’t asking for identity tags. They’re just checking everyone is, you know, human. Just keep your head down. They’ll let us through.’ He wished he could be as sure as he sounded. He didn’t know where that false confidence had come from, but while it lasted he started forward, pulling Arex along by her hand.

  Ahead, two soldiers had stopped a middle-aged couple for questioning. Gunthar’s stomach lurched with fear, but he was committed to his course now. He couldn’t decide whether to meet the soldiers’ eyes or avoid them – which would draw the least attention? He was suddenly, belatedly aware of his fine silk clothing, so out of place, until he realised his tunic had been scuffed and torn and spattered with something dark that could only have been a dead man’s blood.

  Arex’s elegant blue dress had suffered similarly, and Gunthar saw that she was no longer wearing her red amecyte necklace, her mother’s last gift to her. He didn’t know if she had concealed it herself, or if it had been snatched from her.

  They were drawing level with the soldiers now. Gunthar could feel their sharp eyes upon him, scanning him for lesions, moles or anything else that might mark him out as abnormal just as he had been scanning the people around him. He must have passed their inspection, because a moment later he and Arex were past the soldiers and the ARV, on the outside – the safe side, the free side – of their tightening cordon.

  Gunthar didn’t know what to do, at first. He wasn’t alone in this. There were many more escapees milling about, some laughing, some weeping, some wandering dazed or just sitting at the kerbside, shaking their heads. There were spectators too, those who hadn’t been involved in the incident but who had seen the soldiers and were hungry for scandal. Gunthar heard snatches of conversation, and discerned that few of the people here had actually seen a mutant. They were shaken all the same, reflecting upon their imagined close calls, starting rumours that would grow with each retelling.

  Arex was leading Gunthar through all this, and he saw that, unlike him, she had a purpose in mind. They waited until they had cleared the worst of the crowd, until there were no soldiers watching them. Then she took his hand again, and they ran.

  They ran as hard and as fast as they could away from that place.

  They came to rest in a dark alleyway, and Gunthar – who had thought their flight to be aimless – was surprised to find that this was exactly where Arex wanted to be.

  A rusted fire escape ladder snaked its way up a crumbling brick wall, and he sagged against it. His legs felt weak and his lungs were heaving for air. He was shakin
g.

  Arex was drained too, and neither of them spoke nor met each other’s eyes for what seemed like forever. Then she said, in a dulled voice, ‘I should go. Uncle Hanrik will be wondering where I’ve got to. Sometimes he sends the proctors out to look for me.’

  She swung herself onto the bottom rung of the ladder. Gunthar looked up, but he couldn’t see its top. It was swallowed by the darkness.

  ‘I should come with you,’ he said reluctantly. ‘A little further, at least.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Arex. ‘Really, there’s no need. There’s a heavy goods lifter on the roof up here that will take me most of the way.’

  ‘If it’s working,’ said Gunthar.

  ‘I checked the maintenance reports before I came out. You should be getting home too. Can you find your way back, around the PDF cordon?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ said Gunthar, not at all certain that he could.

  Arex turned to leave again, and Gunthar’s heart gave a frightened leap. He wasn’t ready to see her go just yet. He couldn’t be alone. ‘I’m sorry,’ he blurted out.

  She froze with one foot on the ladder, a hand clutching at a higher rung.

  ‘I should have protected you,’ he said. ‘I should have done something.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Arex. ‘What could you have done?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Something more than just… I was useless back there. I could see what I was meant to do, I just couldn’t… I couldn’t do it.’

  Arex stepped off the ladder, took his head in her hands, and gently brushed a curl of dark hair out of his face. ‘Look what happened to the men who tried to fight.’

  ‘It’s just, I always thought, in a situation like that, I would...’

  ‘You did the right thing, Gunthar. You got us out of there.’

  ‘I applied to join the PDF, you know, a few years back. I was seventeen. My friends had been drafted, and they left me behind. I thought, at least I could fight for the Emperor at home. They turned me down. They must have known…’