With his labours done, Bas was about to turn back and retrace his steps when he heard a great rumble from the plains south of the town. He flattened himself and crawled to the rooftop’s edge. A vast cloud of dust had risen up, at least a mile wide. At first he thought it was a sandstorm, but it was closing on Three Rivers and the wind was blowing against it.
Insistent as it was, Bas forgot his hunger then. This was something new, something unexpected. He had to stay and watch. He had to know what it was and how it would affect his survival. A spark of hope almost lit in his heart. Could it be humans? Could it be Imperial forces come to take back the town? Throne above, let it be so.
But it was just a spark. The darkness inside him swallowed it quickly. He had lived too many days and nights without succour to believe things would change now. For all he knew, he was the last living human on Taos III. Given the unstoppable strength and violent nature of the alien invaders, that didn’t seem unlikely at all.
Thus, he wasn’t disappointed so much as unsurprised when the cloud of dust turned out to be a massive greenskin convoy. The air filled with engine noise that would have rivalled a summer thunderstorm. Vehicles of every possible description raced across the plains towards the town. There were hundreds of them with wheels and treads in every possible configuration. Bas’s eyes could hardly take them all in, such was the variety of strange shapes. Monstrous weapons sprouted at all angles from heavily plated turrets. Radiator grills and glacis plates had been modified to look like grotesque faces. Gaudy banners of red and yellow snapped in the windblown dust, painted with crude skulls and axes rendered with childish simplicity.
There was nothing childlike about the riders, though. They were hulking brutes, all green muscle, yellow tusks and thick metal armour. They revelled in the noise of their machines, raising their bestial voices to roar along with them. They cavorted on the backs of bastardised trucks and troop transports. Those that fell off were crushed to red smears beneath the wheels and treads of the vehicles behind, drawing cackles of laughter from all that noticed.
They were terrible to behold and Bas felt his bladder clench. If they had come to stay, to reinforce the greenskins that already controlled Three Rivers, his time was surely up. The odds of evading numbers like these were slim at best. He still had to scavenge for old cans of food each day, still had to fill his water-bottles from any source he could find. He still had to venture out from the safety of his boltholes. When he did, he would face a town swarming with savage nightmares. Why had they come? What had driven them here?
It was then, as this question formed in his mind, and as the first of the vehicles roared along the street below him into the town proper, shaking the foundations of the building atop which he rested, that he saw them:
Humans!
At first, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He stopped breathing and his heart beat a frantic tattoo on his ribs. He wasn’t the last after all. He wasn’t alone on this world. There were dozens of them, chained and caged in the back of slaver trucks. Bas ignored the warbikes and heavy armour that rumbled past now. He had eyes only for the cages.
They looked a weak lot, these people. Beaten down, tortured. It wasn’t a criticism. Bas pitied them. He knew what they must have endured. He alone had lived to witness the deaths of the people of Three Rivers. So many deaths. He had seen what the invaders were capable of. Theirs was a brutality wholly reflected in their terrible appearance.
The slaves in the cages wore soiled rags or nothing at all, men and women both. At one time, Bas might have been curious to look on the women, naked as they were. What ten-year old boy wouldn’t be? Not so now. Not like this. Now, he noticed only the wasted muscles, the clotted blood on their faces and scalps, the ribs that protruded from their bruised torsos.
Most of them looked dead already, like they had given up. Perhaps they didn’t have it in them to end their own lives, but from the looks of them, they would welcome the end when it came.
They are not like me, Bas found himself thinking. They are not survivors. And there are no children.
In that last regard, he was wrong. A moment later, as the last slaver truck passed beneath Bas’s rooftop perch and off up the street towards the town centre, he looked at the rear wall of its cage and saw a boy roughly his own age and height. A boy! Unlike the others, the child was standing upright gripping the bars of the cage, his knuckles white.
There was fire in his eyes. Even from this distance, Bas saw it, felt it. Defiance and the will to live burned bright in this one.
A brother, thought Bas. A friend. And suddenly he knew that his months of loneliness and torment had had a purpose after all, a purpose beyond just spitting in the red eye of the foe. He had survived to see this day. He had survived to find this boy, and he would rescue him so that he would never be alone again. Together, they could bring meaning to each other’s lives. They could look out for each other, depend on each other. Between them, the burden of caution could be shared. Life would be better. Bas was certain of it.
His grandfather’s voice snapped at him from the past.
Weigh everything against your survival. Live to fight. Don’t throw everything away on lost causes.
No, Bas argued back. I can’t go on alone. I will save him for my own sake.
If the old man had been alive, he’d have beaten Bas black and blue for that. Not out of anger – never that – but because each man gets only one life, and some mistakes, once made, cannot be undone.
The streets were still trembling with the roar and passage of the convoy as Bas got to his feet. He suppressed his hunger once again and followed the slaver trucks towards the town centre. There, he would stay low, observe, and draw his plans.
It quickly became clear, as his grandfather drove them away from Arco Station, that Bas was not to live in the great hive-city to the north as he had imagined. The road they followed ran south and the rail terminal’s blocky buildings soon fell away behind them, obscured by dust, heat haze and distance. The land on either side of the wide, empty road was flat and largely dry, populated by little else but hardy grasses and shrubs and the tall, strange cattle which plucked at them. Bas was too scared to ask his grandfather where they were going, or anything else for that matter. The old man smelled of sweat, earth and strong alcohol, and he drove his rickety autocar with his jaw clenched, neither looking at nor speaking to his terrified young charge.
After two or three hours in the vehicle’s hot, stuffy interior, Bas saw a town materialise from the wavering line of the horizon. As the old man drove nearer, Bas became depressingly certain that this was his new home. The buildings at the settlement’s north edge were lop-sided, patchwork affairs with rusting, corrugated walls. It was the first slum-housing Bas had ever seen. Beyond them, the structures got taller and more dense, though little more appealing. An oily pall hung over everything. Towering smoke stacks belched thick, dirty smoke into the sky. As they drove deeper into the town, Bas peered through the windows at the scowling, hard-eyed people on the streets. Tenements dominated. The inky alleys between them spilled tides of refuse onto the main thoroughfares.
Who would live like this? Bas asked himself. Who would stay here?
For the second time that day, he felt the desperate urge to turn around, to run to anywhere but here. But there was simply nowhere to go. He was a seven-year old boy, alone in the Imperium but for the man next to him, linked by blood and nothing else.
‘Welcome to Three Rivers,’ grunted his grandfather.
Bas didn’t feel welcome at all.
Ironically, Three Rivers boasted only one. The other two rivers had dried up as the result of a Munitorum hydropower project some two hundred kilometres to the west, and the town, once prosperous, had gone into economic collapse. The agriculture on which it depended struggled to survive. The workhouses began to fill with children whose parents could no longer sustain them. Many turned to alcohol, others to crime. The streets became unsafe, and not just at night.
In t
his environment, a man like Bas’s grandfather, former Imperial Guard, hardened and honed by decades of war, found work where others could not, despite his age. As Bas would later learn from snippets of hushed conversation on the streets, the old man worked as an occasional fixer, solving problems with violence for those willing to pay the right price. The local public house also paid him to keep troublemakers out, though, if word was to be believed, he caused at least as much trouble as he solved. But on that first night, Bas knew none of this. All he knew was that his former life was over and he had been cast into absolute darkness, a living hell. He had no idea then of just how bad things would get.
The old man’s home was a dingy basement at the bottom of a black tenement in which every window was shielded by wire mesh. The steps down to its entrance were slick with urine and wet garbage. The smell made Bas feel sick for at least the first week. It was better inside, but not by much. A single glowglobe did its best to light a room with no natural illumination whatsoever.
Bas was shown where he would sleep – an old mattress stuffed into a corner near a heater that, in the three years he would live there, would never once be switched on. He was shown the tiny kitchen and told that, in return for food and lodgings, he would be expected to prepare meals for both of them, among a score of other chores. Bas couldn’t even imagine where to start with cooking. His father had employed two private chefs back on the estate. He had never once thought about the effort that went into preparing food.
The lavatory was another shock – little more than a thirty-centimetre hole in the tiled floor with a water pump above it that had to be worked by hand. A steel basin could be filled for washing one’s body, but the water was always ice cold. That first day, Bas held his waste in for hours rather than use that horrid little room, until finally, he thought he would burst. Necessity took him beyond his initial reluctance. He adapted.
They had dinner together an hour after arriving, if it could even be called dinner. His grandfather made that meal. It was a tasteless stew of tinned grox meat and potatoes and, though it smelled awful, Bas was desperately hungry by then and cleared his bowl. His grandfather nodded approvingly, though the hard look never left his eyes. When they had finished, the old man ordered Bas to clear the table. Another first. And so it went, day after day, until Bas learned how to do all the things that were expected of him. When he made mistakes or dared complain, he was punished – a hand as fast as a striking snake would flash out and clip him on the ear. Weeping brought him no sympathy, only contempt.
As hours became days, and days became weeks, Bas discovered he was learning something else he had never known.
He learned to hate.
Salvation Square hadn’t seen this much noise since its construction. Maybe not even then. The ruined buildings shuddered with the ruckus of the greenskin horde and the throaty rumbling of their war engines.
Bas crouched low behind the only intact statue left on the black-tiled roof of the Imperial church that dominated the square’s west side. The sky above was clearing of clouds, beams of bright sunlight slicing through like a hundred burning swords.
He had arrived in time to see the slaver trucks emptied and their occupants whipped and kicked towards the broken double-doors of the administratum building, carrying barrels and sacks. The boy from the last truck had trudged in line with the others, keeping his head down, never meeting the glare of the living nightmares that herded him, but Bas could still feel the boy’s defiant hate radiating from him until he moved out of sight.
The greenskin newcomers began mixing with those that already occupied the town, sizing them up, eyeing their buggies and bikes and tanks. A few fights broke out, bringing hoots of laughter and encouragement that rose to compete with the rumble and stutter of their machines. Losers were butchered without mercy or remorse, to the delight of both groups. Despite the appeal of these fights, however, the alien crowds parted fast when a great red truck roared into the square, cutting down a dozen greenskins with the jagged blades fixed to its radiator grill. There it halted, the arms and legs of the slain sticking out from beneath its dirty red chassis.
From the back of this truck leapt a group of bellowing brutes, each bigger than the last. They glared at all those around them in unspoken challenge, but none dared answer. Their size and bearing made the others step back, creating a circle of open space around the truck. From the vehicle’s rear, their leader stepped down. Bas was sure the statue to which he clung trembled as the huge creature’s iron boots added fresh cracks to the square’s ruined paving.
There could be no doubt that this was an ork of particular status. Size aside, his armour was bright with fresh paint and bore more iconography than any of the others. A pole jutted from the iron plate on his back, rising two metres above his head, seeming to give him even more height than his already daunting three metres. It was strung with helmets and human skulls, some still carrying dry, desiccated flesh. A banner with two crossed hatchets painted in red hung from it, rippling in the warm breeze.
The warboss stomped forwards to the centre of the square where the fountain of St. Ethiope had once stood, roaring and bellowing in what passed for its brutish language. Bas glanced across at the dome of the administratum complex. It had taken a lot of damage in the greenskin invasion. Most of its cobalt-blue tiles had been blasted off, revealing the fractured bare stone beneath. Great gaps had been blown in its surface, making it look like the detritus of a massive cracked egg from which some unimaginable animal had already emerged.
Bas had to see inside. He had to find the boy. He had to find a way to save him.
With a veritable army of orks filling the streets below, he knew he had never been at greater risk than he was now. It was broad daylight. If he moved, one of the beasts might spot him, and it would take only one to alert the others. More than ever, he felt himself balanced on a knife’s edge. But there was no way he could turn back now. His mind was filled with thoughts of companionship. For the first time since he had emerged from hiding into a town held by horrors from another world, he knew purpose and, more importantly, and perhaps more dangerously, he remembered what it was to hope.
He needed to wait. He needed the horde below to become preoccupied with something.
He didn’t have to wait long.
From the doorway of the administratum building, the previously entrenched greenskin leader emerged, roaring and swiping at his subordinates to get them out of his way. In his own right, he was a monster of terrifying proportions, but to Bas’s eye, the newcomer looked bigger and better armoured.
The two bosses locked eyes, both refusing to look down in submission. The horde parted between them, sensing the violence that was about to erupt. The newcomer threw his head back and gave a battle cry, a deafening, blood-freezing challenge. The other howled and foamed with rage, hefted a double-handed chainaxe over his head, and raced down the steps to meet his rival. The greenskin mob roared with delight and bloodlust.
Bas had his opening.
He didn’t hesitate. Crouching low, he slid away from the statue and set off for the gaping wound in the side of the dome, moving roof to roof, careful to keep his distance from the edges lest his silhouette give him away.
He needn’t have worried. Every beady red eye in the area was locked on the battle between the greenskin leaders.
At the end of his first week in Three Rivers, Bas’s grandfather enrolled him in a small scholam owned and operated by the Ecclesiarchy, and the nightmare Bas was living became much, much worse. The other boys who attended were merciless from the start. Bas was a stranger, a newcomer, the easiest and most natural of targets. Furthermore, he had gotten this far in life without ever needing to defend himself, either verbally or physically, and they could smell his weakness like a pack of wild canids smell might smell a wounded beast. It drew them down on him from the first day.
The leader of the pack – the tallest, strongest and most vindictive – was called Kraevin and, at first, he feigned fr
iendship.
‘What’s your name, then?’ he asked Bas in the minutes before the day’s long hours of work, prayer and study began.
Other boys drifting through the wrought iron gates noticed the newcomer and gathered round.
Bas was suddenly uncomfortable with all the attention. It didn’t feel very benign.
‘I’m Bas,’ he answered meekly.
Kraevin laughed at that. ‘Bas the bastard!’ he told the others.
‘Bas the maggot,’ said another.
‘Bas the cave toad!’
The boys laughed. Kraevin folded his arms and squinted down at Bas. ‘I’ve seen you on Lymman Street. You’re livin’ with Old Ironfoot?’
Bas gaped at the other boy, confused. He didn’t know who ‘Ironfoot’ was. His grandfather insisted on being called ‘Sarge’, never grandfather or any variation thereof. Bas had heard others call him the Sarge when they spoke of him, rather than to him. Then it dawned on him and he nodded.
Kraevin grinned. ‘You like that? You know, because of his leg.’
He started walking around Bas with an exaggerated limp, making sounds like a machine. The other boys broke into fits of laughter.
Bas didn’t. He had never asked the Sarge about his leg. He didn’t dare. He knew it caused the old man frequent pain. He had seen that pain scored deep in his face often enough. He knew, too, that the leg made a grinding noise on some days and not on others, though there seemed no particular pattern to it. It didn’t sound anything like the noise Kraevin was making, but that didn’t seem to stop the boys enjoying the joke.
Kraevin stopped in front of Bas. ‘So, what are you to him, eh? You his new boyfriend?’
Again, great fits of laughter from all sides.
‘I… I’m his grandson,’ Bas stuttered. It suddenly dawned on him that every moment spent talking to this boy was a moment spent digging a deeper hole for himself. He needed an escape… and he got it, for all the good it did.
Hammer and Bolter 9 Page 12
