by Ian Watson
Grimm fired almost affably, out into the garden.
It was at this moment that the plasma cannon near the stem of the Chaos vessel opened fire past the blazing mansion, at its vine-clad perimeter railings.
Traffic was coming into view. Half-track armoured vehicles, mounted with heavy stub guns or autocannons. Trotting alongside were ebony automatons, almost, with mirrored faces. Arbites, armed with lasguns.
Plasma disintegrated the railings and caused some casualties. The half-tracks revved and headed directly through the dispersing heat and gas. Before the rear plasma cannon could recharge, the half-tracks were speeding past, on either side of the grounded ship.
What did the Arbitrators make of those alien flying machines swooping and banking, pitted against ferocious angular Marines? The armoured vehicles and the Arbites on foot opened fire impartially on all disturbers of the Emperor’s peace. TUB-TUB-TUBTUB. Heavy bullets belched from the big stubbers. Laser-packets rocketed pyrotechnically. They were like fireworks hurled against steel. Those renegades were armoured strongly enough to cause heavy bullets merely to ricochet.
The fight was threefold and insensate. By now Jaq’s mansion was suffering enough collateral damage to bring masonry crashing down, interspersed by showers of glass from upper windows. Noises of detonations were deafening.
‘Let’s get outa here!’ shouted Grimm.
Jaq seized his discarded robe to don over his mesh-armour. ‘My bone!’ exclaimed Lex. What about the thigh bone on which he had carved for the sake of his Chapter, should he ever rejoin them? And for the sake of his soul!
Stray las-fire ignited curtains. Flames climbed to lick the ceiling.
‘Gotta leave your bone, you great mastiff,’ yelled Grimm.
Lex groaned with grief.
‘What about the Jester?’ shrieked Rakel.
‘Leave him to roast, of course!’ shouted Grimm. ‘And the Book of Dandruff too. Give his snooty pals something to occupy their minds. If those guys can deal with the Chaos boys as well as with the mirror-faces then they’d better take up fire-fighting pretty damn fast—’
Distracted by the nuisance of the Arbites, Chaos Marines were succumbing to the aerial onslaught. The damaged Chaos vessel began to throb and to vent wisps of plasma. Despite its damage it was preparing for take-off. The pilot was preparing to abandon all the surviving Traitor Marines.
AMIDST SUCH BEDLAM it was indeed possible to escape to the sidelines and away, blessing the dust which still hung in the air and the smoke drifting from explosions and fires.
As Jaq and his companions were fleeing, a small sun seemed to rise against the hazed ruby immensity of Sabulorb’s own sun, which was now reasserting itself in the sky. A small and wobbling minor sun: that was the plasma torch of the Chaos ship. With a vane missing, and with the other weakening it had suffered, that ship might well be unsteerable. If it achieved escape velocity the renegade ship might only plunge onward through space... until in a few days time – or much earlier, depending on velocity – it fell into the embrace of the vast red sun. How deeply would it penetrate the furnace-hot outer gases before exploding? Or would the pilot suicidally activate the warp-drive to escape this fate, annihilating his vessel and disrupting space in its vicinity, sending a shock-wave inward through the contracting red giant?
On the vast scale of a sun, this would be a puny enough shock-wave, but perhaps significant. A dying butterfly begetting a tempest.
TWELVE
Firestorm
IT HAPPENED THAT an airborne troop carrier arrived at Shandabar’s spaceport from the northerly continent just prior to the storm. On board were two hundred hardened soldiers. They were due to be sent off-world to join the Sabulorb regiments. A transport ship of the Imperial Guard had landed at the spaceport to receive the new intake. Two squads of veteran Guards were escorts. Half of the Shandabar garrison was routinely stationed near the perimeter of the spaceport, the remainder being near the governor’s palace. In the wake of the storm these received a static-crackly vox message from the senior judge at the Arbites courthouse in the city.
Aliens coming from the direction of the Grey Desert on armed, two-person flying vehicles had raided a suburb. That same suburb had already been invaded under cover of the storm by other formidable armoured warriors. Extraterrestrial raiders had chosen Shandabar as the venue for a private war. Many Arbitrators had died. Urgent assistance was requested.
Due to the assassination of a judge and the massacre of a patrol in the city, the courthouse had adopted a policy of rapid response to sightings and reports.
Veterans and hardened recruits disembarked from the spacecraft to be met by all available surface troop carriers of the spaceport garrison, bulging armoured skirt-plates protecting their huge desert-tyres. Shortly after these vehicles had left the spaceport, an unidentified vessel descended from orbit without warning or permission. During the final stages of its descent, it fired a plasma cannon at that almost empty Imperial Guard ship upon the ground. The Guard ship exploded. Scattered wreckage crippled the nearby troop carrier.
No sooner was the intruder down than a burst of plasma demolished the control tower. Next, the terminal was torched. Huge warriors in terrifying power armour emerged from the angular vessel.
Elsewhere in Shandabar many jetbikes were sighted, steered by tall figures in green armour and helmets resembling great smooth hoods...
CITIZENS WHO HAD sheltered from the storm emerged to find dust-choked victims lying dead in drifts of grit in every street. A syncopation of distant explosions and gunfire from various quarters suggested that gangs must be taking advantage of the confusion.
Indeed deacons in camouflage clothing had set out from the Oriens Temple to launch an attack of retaliation upon the Austral Temple – though this was not the cause of most of the crackle and thump.
Viewscreens, set up throughout the city for the ceremony of the unveiling, had still not been dismantled. A judge messaged the Oriens Temple, ordering its high priest to use the camera link to proclaim a state of emergency and immediate curfew via those public screens. City being under alien attack. Arbitrators restoring order mercilessly, being assisted by Imperial Guards.
In the meantime devotees of the Imperial cult had begun flocking through grime-clogged streets to the courtyard of Oriens to pray. As prayers arose, like a portent there appeared above the vast courtyard a small armed flying vehicle – with Death as a passenger. Riding pillion was a bizarre lanky figure with a smoke-blackened skull of a face and a body of sooty bones stitched to a smouldering cloak. Death seemed to be in agony, and insane, and perhaps himself soon to die.
Through a loudhailer Death proclaimed to whoever could hear: ‘YOUR SUN IS ABOUT TO MELT YOUR WORLD! YOUR SUN IS ABOUT TO BOIL YOUR SEAS! YOUR SUN IS ABOUT TO BAKE YOUR DESERTS! ALL FLESH WILL CHAR, ALL BLOOD WILL BOIL, ALL LIFE WILL END!’
The shocked high priest transmitted this scene to dust-coated screens throughout entire districts of Shandabar. Most viewers did not fully savvy the standard ImpGoth of this apparition. Yet the scorched Jester’s gist was clear. The sun pulsed heat through the lingering dust. The whole sky seemed aflame.
And then Death the Jester fell from his perch – as if he had been shot in order to silence him. Down he tumbled to sprawl burned and broken.
Rescued from the blazing mansion by the wild bravery of two green-clad guardians who had heeded his psychic cries, rescued together with the smouldering Book of Rhana Dandra, Marb’ailtor had suffered serious burns. Even so, Marb’ailtor insisted to his rescuers that this city must be plunged into absolute anarchy so as to allow the eldar to cope with the Chaos renegades and to safeguard the Book of Fate without interference by organized human authority – and so as to be able to track that mad magus-inquisitor who had earned off a crucial page.
Let there be utter anarchy!
Marb’ailtor would endure long enough to bring this anarchy about.
Once the Death Jester had fallen from the Vyper, and once the Vy
per had sped off, the high priest finally uttered the curfew order. This command from the courthouse was completely at odds with Death’s warning about imminent calamity. Or was it at odds at all? Let the people passively await extinction – while, unimpeded by crowds, the authorities used some escape route!
Panic rippled through Shandabar. Panic, and outcry. The curfew was ignored. If two million people – minus a few thousand suffocated corpses – all disobeyed, what could mere hundreds of Arbites do?
Fires were soon burning here and there in the city. The Austral Temple was in flames.
Fire. Heat. The furnace of the sun, slowly sinking. Dust-haze, heat-haze, plumes of smoke, including one from the direction of the spaceport...
Rumour of an escape route spread like a flash-fire. Not of escape by way of the spaceport! The spaceport was crippled. A hostile warship sat there. Whenever a freighter attempted to power up, a blast of plasma would strike it; a new explosion would rock the city.
Escape by way of the broad Bihishti River? Flight upon its cool waters? Thousands of people mobbed boats. Boats capsized under the burden of bodies. Thousands of people drowned. That could not be the route. Boats were too slow. None of the authorities were fleeing by way of water.
A zealot preached about penitence in the desert, salvation in the wilderness: ‘Be confronting your souls in the desert as a test of faith! Be seeking the crucible of tomonow’s dawn!’
The vast majority of people had no clear idea of what was happening except that there was desperate urgency to distance themselves from Shandabar. Shandabar would burn. Soon a massive exodus was beginning. In its hysterical surge this resembled the ceremony of the unveiling, though on a greater scale.
By land-train and by trucks and by limousines, all bouncing along upon balloon-wheels, and by rickshaws and sand-sleighs and carts pulled by camelopards, and on the backs of camelopards, and on foot the evacuation commenced in entire disorder. As the sun at last withdrew its ruddy light and intemperate heat, sinking below the camber of the world, a whole population was fanning out southward across the Grey Desert in the general direction of Bara Bandobast.
Minor battles accompanied the mass migration. Islands of violence eddied within the flood of folk. Highly mobile homicidal Chaos Marines fought running skirmishes with lightning-swift aliens. Imperial Guardsmen were involved, Arbitrators too. These rolling skirmishes cut minor swathes through the exodus, serving as further goads to the mass of refugees. How much dust so many people were raising too. What with the dust and the setting of the sun, there was soon a blind lemming-surge, illuminated only by the discharge of weaponry.
About the time when Shandabar would have receded to a bumpy line along the horizon – had there been any visibility – a chain of distant explosions rocked the desert. Seconds later a scorching gust from the north carried much airborne dust away, revealing a wall of flame along that same horizon, a bright and rippling banner, and bringing uncanny illumination to the desert.
‘WHAT IN THE name of all my ancestors...’
Grimm and Lex and Jaq and Rakel were jammed inside the cabin of a single-carriage land-train. Until now the driver, obedient to the boltgun held at the back of his neck, had been steering by the hazy beams from the transport vehicle’s lamps. Suddenly: that great brightness from behind was reflected in the ornate mirrors jutting from either side of the cab.
If nomad bandits ever loomed in those mirrors, sprinting on foot or riding camelopards, hoping to board such a train from the rear, automated autoguns were mounted at the rear and half way along the carriage roof to deter them. On the route to Bara Bandobast bandits were rarely a problem. Yet right now the roof of the land-train was packed with refugees who had climbed and clung, dense as the fleas on the head of a swimming cudbear. Jaq hadn’t wanted boarders shot off. Those people were a cloak, comparable to the human cloaks worn by many other vehicles. They were camouflage.
The goods carriage was full of thoroughbred camelopards from breeding stables on the southern outskirts of Shandabar. According to the driver, the beasts were being sent to take part in annual desert races at Bara Bandobast; hence this journey of his, which Jaq and company had hijacked. The storm had died; he had been setting out when other events supervened.
Those animals were hobbled to prevent them from kicking each other. They were muzzled to stop them from biting their neighbours. Their weight and that of all the refugees up top caused the land-train’s engine to labour somewhat. Jaq did not wish for high speed. If they outdistanced the mass stampede, they might become conspicuous. As things were, how might pursuers of whatever affiliation be able to single them out amid untold vehicles and a fleeing mass of a million people or more?
That light which pierced the dust; that blast which blew dust away temporarily, that wall of flame...
‘Has Shandabar been nuked?’ exclaimed Grimm.
Lex shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Even ordinary dust at a certain number of grains per cubic centimetre in an oxygenated atmosphere can explode if there’s a trigger. I think that the force of the storm may have exposed huge deposits of carbon, sulphur and nitre of potassium in the Grey Desert. It bore these aloft and mixed them. It spread them as an aerosol across the city. This thinned to a critical density. Plasma explosions ignited the mix. The city exploded in a fire-storm.’
‘Do you mean to say we’re travelling across a desert of gunpowder? This can explode too?’
‘I doubt it, abhuman, otherwise flame would be reaching us by now. Other factors in the city could be lingering electrostatic charge due to friction, and the effect of Chaos. We ought to offer up a prayer of thanks that Shandabar exploded.’
‘In the morning when the sun rises, the temperature will soar. The mob would be wise to return home. But now home has been annihilated. We will continue to be a needle in a very vast haystack. Eldar and Chaos renegades and local peace enforcers might kill each other. They will certainly become fatigued. Not revving too fast, driver!’
They must try to catch some sleep, or half-sleep, in the crowded vibrating cab while Lex or Jaq or Grimm in turn supervised the driver. Rakel could sleep as long as she pleased, or was able to.
HOW COULD JAQ’S party know that a second Chaos vessel had landed at the spaceport? Why should they need to know, when the fire-storm had already scorched that vessel?
COME THE DAWN, the smoke from Shandabar was a distant smudge upon the northern horizon. In all directions the desert was dotted with vehicles and with the fittest foot-sloggers who had kept up their best pace throughout the menacingly warm night. Amazing, really, that there were still pedestrians in the vicinity. Fear of death was such a fierce spur. But also, bargains must have been made.
Vehicles would have broken down fairly recently, or run out of fuel, shedding occupants and hangers-on. Nearly all functioning vehicles were slowed by the burden of hangers-on.
Vehicles lumbered along surrounded by a gang of would-be boarders like sweat-flies accompanying a tormented and exhausted grox. Social organization had emerged amongst this vast rolling flood of fugitives so that people would take turns to ride and to jog.
The rumour endured that a route to safety existed. Who actually knew the route? Who would wish, in ignorance of that route, to outdistance whoever might possess this knowledge?
Did the route simply lead to Bara Bandobast? If the sun were about to destroy all life on Sabulorb, Bara Bandobast would burn too!
Might the secret of the route involve the fierce aliens? Or those terrible armoured marauders? Dispersed amidst the immense exodus, survivors of both factions continued to skirmish wearily with one another and with local forces. Come dawn, only one armed flying bike seemed to be still aloft. None of the two-person fliers could be seen. Intakes choked by dust, had their pilots abandoned them? Had they been crippled by shots? Who could say? Skirmishes were akin to the dartings of frenzy-fish amidst a shoal of sprats. Where the sprats were so numerous, and the skirmishes comparatively few, the chance of
being killed in crossfire was actually quite small – except for the persons actually killed. Sprats and vehicles and camelopards were being used as moving cover by the combatants.
Did one really wish to distance oneself from those fighters who might know the way to safety? Fighters came from off-world. If the world was to burn, safety must be off-world. Rumour spread, pantingly, of a huge fleet of starships waiting in the deep desert to evacuate people whose faith was strong, whose faith was now being tested.
QUIVERING, THE SUN shouldered up over the eastern horizon. Soon heat began to beat a gong upon the desert floor. The sky glared. Mirages burgeoned: of phantom vehicles floating along amidst the actual vehicles. Of floods of spectral people. Of distant shimmering towers. Surely those must be the starships of the rumour. Mirages appeared of a wide shallow river through which far-off refugees seemed to be wading.
How could one be certain which sights were real and which were imaginary? How excellent these many mirages. How confusing for anyone trying to find a needle in all the hay, now that the desert was bright.
OF A SUDDEN the driver slumped over the controls. He was asleep. The land-train swerved and stopped abruptly. A couple of dingers were pitched from their perch. One scrambled to claw his way back up over the front of the cab. He stared in at the congestion within the cab, and at the driver seemingly dead – of a heart attack, of a stroke? The refugee gestured, offering himself as a substitute driver.
Pushing the driver aside, Grimm switched on the powerful dust-wiper to sweep the petitioner away. The man lost his hold. As he fell his hand closed on the wiper arm, dragging it down, bending it away from the windshield.
The driver woke groggily.
‘Whaz happening-?’ His hand flailed. He was in no state to drive any more. The throbbing engine had cut out. They could hear feet on the roof. They could hear drumming too. The hobbled camelopards were thumping their hooves in complaint.
