Let The Galaxy Burn

by Marc

  You could get used to the loneliness? How often did you weep, that first year in the wilderness? How often did you stand atop the high cliff at Korou and think of leaping off? How often have you longed to return to your family, dreamt that they will welcome you back with smiles on their faces and open arms? This will not happen, Joshua. You will always be alone if you do not let me help you. Never again to know friendship. Never will you meet a pretty girl and wander in the marketplace buying gifts for each other. Never will you meet the woman of your dreams and marry her, to the jubilation of those around you. You are loathed, hated, cast out. You are a vagrant, a menace, a mutant. You are in league with daemons! You have betrayed the Emperor! You will ultimately destroy those who you once loved and who once loved you!

  ‘That’s not true! It’s not!’ Joshua screamed aloud, his voice echoing off the damp pit walls.

  It is what they thought of you, loathsome wretch that you are. You were a weakling, a failure. They had no choice but to want to kill you! Now you have no choice but to kill them!

  With a howl, Joshua turned on the bloated fiend of the pit, his hands reaching through the folds of flesh to grab its throat.

  ‘They never understood!’ he screamed. ‘It wasn’t my fault! I never did anything wrong! I never chose to be like this! They should have listened to me! I tried to tell them! I tried! Damn them all to hell! I never did anything wrong! I would never hurt anyone!’ Joshua’s screaming became primal and incoherent, a high-pitched wailing which carried a lifetime of suppressed anger and bitterness. The desperation that only an abandoned child could know reverberated around the chamber in a rending banshee screech that seemed to last forever.

  As he howled, Joshua’s hands closed tighter and tighter on the monster’s throat, slowly choking the life from it. Its feeble limbs thrashed wildly in the mud, throwing up sprays of foul liquid. Joshua felt all of his anger and hate pouring into his arms, imbuing his grip with a vice-like strength. With a final effort he snapped the creature’s neck, its tentacles falling limply into the murky water, a foul dribble of slime trickling from its fat lips.

  Suddenly Joshua released his grip and he stood back, horrified, watching the foul corpse slip silently back into the filth.

  ‘I’m going now.’ he told the Voice with his mind, panting, his whole body trembling with emotion. ‘I don’t like your adventures. I don’t like what you say to me, what you’ve made me do. I never want to hear you again. I will learn to cope with my life, without your venomous whispers in my ear. I never again want to feel as ashamed as I do now. Return me home and then leave me.’

  As you wish, Joshua. You have already done all that I need of you. Simply think of yourself back in the woods and you will leave this place. You will not hear my voice again. But I will be near, of that you can be certain.

  JOSHUA WOKE UP with a start, his eyes snapping open. For a moment he did not know where he was. All around him grew lush plants, and he found he was resting against the thick trunk of a tree, whose branches spread high into the air above him. Looking around, he saw a high wall encircling the area, broken only by an ornate gate, wrought in the shape of a grinning mask.

  With a shock, Joshua realised that these must be the gardens of Imperial Commander Ree’s palace. To be caught here would mean imprisonment for him, despite his young age. He stood quickly, putting the tree between himself and the gate.

  How had he come to be here? He had been dreaming, but he couldn’t remember of what; the dream had slipped away like morning mist. And why had the guards not found him sleeping and oblivious to everything, right here in their midst?

  Trying to calm himself, Joshua relaxed his mind, letting it flow from the restricting confines of his body, just as the Voice had taught him to do. He found a group of guards not far away, could feel their agitated thoughts. Gently, he slipped his mind next to theirs, one by one, touching them only briefly so that they would not know he was there.

  Lasguns had no effect on them…

  Just burnt them, Emperor’s mercy. Bodies everywhere…

  A rat would’ve had problems getting down all the way to the Imperial Commander’s bedchambers…

  Sentries on the gate cut down…

  Strangled and his neck broken. What kind of person would do this…

  Nobody could have removed that ventilation duct without heavy machinery…

  No sign of them since, either of them. Just disappeared without trace…

  Somebody had killed the Imperial Commander? Joshua was desperately confused. It would go ill for him if they found him here after the Imperial Commander had been murdered. They might think he had something to do with it.

  As he looked around desperately for a way to escape, Joshua had a sudden flash of recollection. The dank woods from his dream were a twisted version of the gardens that now surrounded him. Had it really been him? Was this where it had started?

  He closed his eyes and hung his head in his hands. The preachers had always warned that the daemons of the warp could possess a person, drive him to do things like this. Joshua’s mind reeled.

  They had said that… that the ancient, formless denizens of the Empyrean were formed from the sins of the impure and craved after the material universe like a starving man hungers for bread. They could not normally enter the realm of the living, but instead guided unwitting mortals, and sometimes willing servants, to help them break through the boundaries separating the spaces between the stars.

  They sought to dominate other creatures, to make them subservient to their immortal and alien whims and needs. It was why they sought out witches and warlocks, because they were the best tools for such monstrosities. It was why the Inquisition and Ecclesiarchy were always hunting down those of magical prowess.

  But the Voice had always told Joshua this wasn’t true! It was a lie propagated by the Imperial authorities because they feared the power of the blessed ones. Joshua’s thoughts were lurching, but through the muddled haze of his mind he caught a strange smell, the metallic reek of blood.

  Opening his eyes, he looked about him, but could not see anything. Then he looked at his hands for the first time. Both were stained red, smeared with dried blood.

  The Voice, his only friend when all else had deserted him so cruelly, had lied to him, had lied from the very first moment. It had used him, manipulated him. And now it had made him do the most terrible thing ever, and then deserted him, just as his own family had deserted him before. Joshua’s howl of fear and desperation echoed off the stone walls.

  And in the warp, something laughed.

  ANCIENT HISTORY

  Andy Chambers

  Cross the stars and fight for glory

  But ’ware the heaven’s wrath.

  Take yer salt and hear a shipman’s story.

  Listen to tales of the gulf,

  Of stars that sing and worlds what lie

  Beyond the ghosts of the rim.

  But remember, lads, there ain’t no words

  For every void-born thing.

  — Shipmen’s labour-chant, Gothic Sector, Segmentum Obscurus

  NATHAN RAN DOWN the stinking alley, panting and sweating. He could hear shouts and a scuffle behind him as they pounced on Kendrikson. His mind raced faster than his feet across the cracked slabs. Poor old Kendrikson. Still – better him than me. He leapt over a prostrate body almost invisible in the darkness as the irony of the situation struck home. At least that’s the last time he’ll try to get me killed.

  At the corner he risked a glance back. A lone streetlume cast a pool of yellow light over a scene that looked suspiciously like one from some Ministorum morality play. Four burly, shaven headed men in dun-coloured coveralls were hauling Kendrikson to his feet. He seemed unduly surprised, nay stunned, to be cast in the starring role of the eponymous incautious reveller laid low by local ruffians, cultists or worse – surely a punishment from the God-Emperor for his carelessness and self-indulgence.

  The image was shattered when the officer
stepped out from the shadows to congratulate the men on their catch. Nathan had never seen an Imperial Naval officer before but he had no doubt that he was looking at one now. Tall, poised, immaculately dressed in a tailored uniform coat and a pair of glossy black boots which had probably never trodden the dust of a planet for more than a few hours. He would surely be a junior officer to be in charge of a gang like that, trawling through the back alleys of Juniptown to fill out some labour team aboard his ship. Junior or not, he radiated the absolute assuredness that only generations of breeding and a lifetime of training engenders.

  Nathan started to back away as his mind raced on. There were rumours that Imperial ships would come from Port Maw to Lethe, but everyone said that sort of thing when there was a war among the stars. Half the people hoped the fleet would come and save them from Sanctus-knows-what, while the other half were afraid that the fleet would bring the war to their doorstep. Nobody had ever thought that the Navy would come to steal a tithe of men and take them away on ships. Men who, if only half the stories were true, would never be seen again.

  Kendrikson was off for a cruise and there was nothing Nathan could do about it. He certainly didn’t intend take on a pressgang single-handed.

  ‘Well, well.’ said a finely cultured voice from behind him. ‘It looks like young Rae missed one – get him lads!’

  A blow struck his head, bright stars flashed before his eyes and he fell into waiting arms which bore him off even as his consciousness slipped away.

  NATHAN WOKE TO the sound of a voice speaking. It sounded deep, resonant and faintly amused. He was amongst a crowd, being propped up by a stranger. The voice rolled on through his confused awakening like martial music: proud and insistent.

  ‘…I could take this ship twice around the galaxy and wander the void for a hundred years if the Emperor wished it. One thing would bring me back to the hallowed worlds of humanity before we’d been out for more than a year! Crew! You lucky fellows have won the chance to serve aboard one of the sector’s finest ships, the Retribution. Remember that name with pride and affection and all else should come naturally.’

  Nathan must have looked confused because the stranger, a thin, dark man with tired eyes, whispered to him: ‘It’s the captain. ‘Ere to welcome us aboard – sez it’ll likely be the first and last time we see’s ‘im.’

  Nathan blinked and gazed about him.

  A vast, curving wall disappeared out of sight above them. It was pierced by arches showing a night sky speckled with stars. Halfway up it a buttressed gallery swelled outwards and it was from there that the captain spoke. His voice must have been amplified somehow, because a normal man’s voice would have been drowned by a distant rumble which seemed to radiate from the worn stone floor they stood upon. A jolt of panic shot through Nathan as he realised they must be aboard some ship. No, an Imperial warship, he corrected himself. Even as he watched the stars in the windows were sliding across it almost imperceptibly. They were already underway.

  NATHAN WAS INDUCTED into a gun crew: number six gun of the port deck, known to its crew as Balthasar. Him, Kendrikson, the tired-eyed man – who introduced himself as Fetchin – and five others were beaten, stripped, shaved, deloused, tattooed with their serial numbers and issued with dun-coloured coveralls, apparently tailored so that their one size would fit no one. The gun officer for Balthasar, a Lieutenant Gabriel, seemed decent enough and didn’t revel in their humiliation. He and his enforcers, his armsmen, simply crashed their individuality and made it clear that they were to obey orders and cause no trouble. He was even good enough to explain to them that men were a commodity on a warship, like food or fuel or ammunition. When the ship ran out, it came to a world to resupply. Simple as that. Even before the lieutenant had finished his little speech, Nathan had hardened his resolve to escape at the first opportunity.

  They were set to work in a gunroom, a cavernous, hangar-like space which reeked of grease and ozone. It was part-filled by cranes and gantries but dominated by the breech of Balthasar, apparently some sort of gigantic cannon as big as a house and nested at the centre of an insane web of power coils, chains, coolant pipes, wiring, hydraulic rams and less easily identified attachments. By the unspoken rule which applies to all new recruits, the old hands set them to work on the most mundane, laborious and unwelcome tasks in the gunroom. In this case that meant long, hard work-shifts scraping off corrosion – which an old hand named Kron helpfully pointed out bloomed like a weed in the moist, oxygen-rich air inside the ship – or chipping away frozen coolant from the branches of piping. They ate on the gundeck too, their food arriving on square metal trays through an aperture in the wall.

  Food breaks were accompanied by the arrival of the crewmen the old hands referred to as armsmen. They came through one of the two heavy pressure doors that led into the gunroom, from the direction which Nathan had nominated as ‘south’. The armsmen wore leather harnesses over their coveralls and carried long clubs and stubby pistols or shotguns. They kept a respectful distance while the guncrew ate, but their attitude spoke of a readiness to do harm if necessary. Once the food was consumed and the trays returned to their slot, the armsmen left through the north door, presumably to perform the same, apparently pointless function in the next gunroom.

  Again, it was Kron who explained the purpose of the armsmen’s vigil to the new recruits. ‘They’re here to make sure everyone gets their own share, lads.’ Kron told diem. ‘An’ that nobody takes what isn’t theirs.’

  Fetchin seemed shocked. ‘So yer can’t even keep a crumb for later? Or swap some wi’ yer mate.’

  Kron’s answering grin was an ugly sight, particularly because he, like many of the old hands, had been patched with steel over old injuries. In Kron’s case the tech-priests had left him with a half-skull of polished metal and set with a red-glowing eye. ‘Not unless you want a few extra lumps to nurse, no.’ he chortled.

  Seeing disbelief still written on their faces he added more quietly: ‘Was a time, years ago, when we had a… bad captain. He didn’t keep a watch, boys. Was alright at first, the bully boys didn’t take too much and no one starved. But then we were caught in a storm ‘tween Esperance and the K-star for months, the ether was torn apart by cross-chasers and remnants so much that it was all the Navigators could do to keep us from being lost. Pretty soon men’s hunger made ‘em desperate, an’ desperate men’ll do terrible things.’

  Kron closed his real eye, blocking out bad memories.

  Nathan had seen plenty of desperate men around Juniptown in wet season, when work was scarce or non-existent.

  ‘I’ve seen floors swimming with blood after fights over a husk of bread. The captain’s right to keep a watch.’ he said.

  Kron looked at him curiously for a moment and then nodded. ‘That’s right, lad. Better to be harsh now than deadly later.’

  Food was palmed and traded and fought over anyway but in a quiet, cautious fashion which Nathan suspected the armsmen chose to overlook. Several times he tried to speak with Kendrikson but each time his old rival ignored him or, if Nathan pressed him harder, fled away from him. The old hands brooked no fighting so Nathan took it no further. He judged that the old hands were right: punishments for fighting were liable to be swift and brutal.

  At the end of each workshift the crew slept in a low bunkroom beneath the gundeck. armsmen arrived to drive them below, although they needed little persuasion to drop their tools and find their way down into the gloomy, red-lit chamber. There were no exits from the bunkroom saving the hatch which led back up to the gunroom, cleansing and purging was undertaken in ridiculously small metal cubicles off the bunkroom. Nathan watched and waited but opportunities for escape never presented themselves. Soon work-shifts and sleep-shifts rolled relentlessly past until all sense of time was lost, until there was only toil and rest from toil, and then toil renewed.

  IT WAS ONLY after the ship had left the Lethe system and passed into warp space that Nathan began to understand why men were a commodity. The
warp made everything different somehow. Even the cavernous gundeck felt claustrophobic and oppressive, as if immense pressures existed just beyond the hull. Then the dreams had started, nightmares which left the mind dark and full of half-formed images upon waking. Some men screamed and wept in their sleep without knowing why, and others just grew more and more introverted and silent. Fetchin was one of these and Nathan had seen a weird light coming into his eyes long before it happened.

  It was the end of the work-shift. The crew was straggling down the hatch to the bunkroom, more reluctant now that the dreams had come. Fetchin was last of all, listlessly scouring at a corrosion spot long after the others had moved away. The armsmen stepped forward with hard faces and Fetchin backed away with a stooped, almost scuttling gait. Almost at the top of the ladder, Nathan stopped and turned, his mind fumbling for some encouraging words which might persuade Fetchin to go below.

  Before he could speak Fetchin backed into another of the guncrew. The man cursed and roughly thrust Fetchin away. From there it seemed as if Fetchin was possessed by devils. He pounced on the man with a snarl and bore him down. A horribly throttled gurgle escaped the thrashing pair and Fetchin rolled away, his lips and chin bloody with the ruin of the man’s throat. Two men tried to pin the devil-Fetchin’s arms but he slipped through their grasp like an eel, raking clawed fingers across their eyes with a hysterical, wordless scream.

  The armsmen came pelting up and the first to reach the scene swung at Fetchin’s shoulder with his long club, probably aiming to break his collarbone. The blow never connected. Fetchin grasped the downrushing arm with preternatural speed and swung the armsman away with a horrible cracking, popping sound which spoke of dislocated joints and snapping bones. The madman turned suddenly and bounded towards the bunkroom hatch. Men scattered as his last manic leap sent him hurtling straight at Nathan.

  Nathan saw the animal fire in Fetchin’s eyes in the age-long instant as he leapt and felt his guts turn icy. There was not a scrap, not a hint of the mild, world-weary colleague he had come to know. All reason was lost in that glare, and Nathan was frozen in it.