Commissar

by Andy Hoare

  More shouts sounded from behind as more of the colonel’s murderers picked up Vahn’s trail. Now he dared throw a brief glance over his shoulder only to see a mob of at least two-dozen pursuers silhouetted against the receding portal. Reinforcements were emerging from small service tunnels joining to the vestibule and each was baying for his blood. His heart pounding, Vahn spat a curse that would have earned him a stretch in the hard labour halls were any claviger-warden alive to hear it.

  Then Vahn stumbled. His ankle turned as his shin struck something twisted, stiff and rotten sprawled across his path. The mob roared as it saw his plight but somehow Vahn kept his footing, pounding onwards through the gloom. As the portal receded the vestibule was plunged into ever-darker shadow. The majority of the lumen-strips that ordinarily illuminated the tunnel had been smashed, the remains of their glass casings crunching beneath Vahn’s boots as he ran. He saw more of the twisted forms ahead and as he passed the first he realised they were the butchered remains of the claviger-wardens that had attempted to hold the vestibule when the uprising first erupted. Even in the low, flickering light of the surviving lumen-strips, Vahn saw the walls of the vestibule were daubed with obscene blasphemies in the wardens’ blood. He had no doubt that he too would meet such a gruesome fate should the mob catch up with him.

  Beneath the blood-daubed scrawls Vahn saw the remains of stencilled lettering. It told him he was approaching the halfway point in the tunnel. The mob had dropped back slightly, the undisciplined mass unable to match the speed of a single runner. Knowing that the remainder of his life would be measured in scant minutes if he couldn’t shake his pursuers Vahn studied the darkness up ahead as he ran. Would the gate into the central spire be open? He prayed it would and he soon found out.

  Vahn’s heart sank as he closed on the end of the vestibule. He skidded to a halt, his boots kicking up sharp grit. He shouted a single-syllable curse word that echoed back down the vestibule to mingle with the roar of the pursuing mob. The portal was blocked by an armoured shield dropped from above, a defensive measure intended to seal the central spire from the carceri chambers and lock the claviger-wardens in until outside help arrived.

  Hoots and whistles filled the tunnel as the mob saw Vahn halt. Their blood was up and they knew they had their prey cornered. Vahn looked about for an alternative escape route and saw several service tunnel entrances nearby. He moved sideways towards the nearest as the mob slowed their advance but as soon as he neared the mouth he saw movement inside. More rebel convicts waited within the service tunnel, blocking his last possible escape route.

  Vahn hefted the iron bar. He tossed it spinning into the air and caught it one-handed in nonchalant, bloody-minded defiance of the mob. The first rank of rebel convicts slowed to a halt and those further back lapped around the flanks forming an impenetrable semicircle around Vahn. He glanced at the service tunnel entrance again as he weighed up his chances.

  Two men stepped forward from the crowd. Vahn recognised them as the companions of the leader he’d slain earlier. One was a brute, his head bald and his nose little more than a squashed mass of scar tissue. The other was lanky and alert with black hair tied back into a tail and his face striped with dark red war paint. The latter was the first to speak.

  ‘I reckon we’ll take you living,’ the man said. ‘The colonel likes making examples…’

  Nervous laughter rippled through the crowd as if its members felt relief in sharing a joke aimed at someone other than themselves. Vahn’s mind was made up. He tensed his muscles and prepared to rush the entrance to the narrow service tunnel.

  The taller of the two rebel convicts facing Vahn anticipated his move and leaped forward to block him. Vahn sprang past his attacker and twisted as he hit the ground hard an instant before a wickedly serrated shiv cut the air a hand’s span from his face. The brute barrelled forward and shoved his mate out of the way in an attempt to stomp Vahn’s face into the ground beneath his hobnailed boots. Vahn snatched his head aside and rolled forward towards the tunnel entrance. Another rebel convict appeared from out of nowhere with a length of spar, tipped with a coil of barbed wire held two-handed across his torso. Vahn continued his roll and ducked under the man’s two-handed swing. He kicked upwards and crushed his adversary’s jewels with his heel. The convict bellowed as he toppled to the ground and the route to the tunnel entrance was clear.

  Vahn was up in a second and it wasn’t a moment too soon. The mob was surging forward, an unruly mass of baying murderers intent on tearing him limb from limb despite its leaders’ intention to drag him before the uprising’s figurehead, Colonel Strannik. Vahn sprinted the last few metres to the tunnel entrance, readying himself to knock aside the figures he saw lurking there.

  One of those figures stepped out from the entrance as he closed and levelled a crudely made firearm directly at his head. The weapon’s barrel loomed large but there was nothing Vahn could do to avoid the inevitable blast.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ the bearer of the weapon ordered.

  Acting on instinct, Vahn dodged to one side and dove into the tunnel entrance. The cramped space erupted in noise and smoke as the firearm discharged right into the mob. A cone of improvised pellets spat outwards to lacerate the exposed flesh of a dozen rebel convicts. While not powerful enough to kill outright, the weapon caused its victims to tumble screaming to the ground and those behind them to trip over the writhing bodies.

  ‘Time to get moving!’ Vahn’s deliverer shouted. The small tunnel was dark and still filled with the acrid smog of the weapon’s discharge. All he could see of the firer was a hulking shadow but Vahn sensed there were at least another three people in the tunnel with him.

  Before he could respond the firer shoved him hard in the back and propelled him into the tunnel’s depths. ‘I don’t have time to reload this junker,’ the man shouted. ‘Move now or stick around, your choice!’

  Vahn wasn’t used to being ordered around, not by other convicts at least, but the man was right. As he pressed on, three convicts ahead and one behind, Vahn called out to no one in particular, ‘Anyone know where you’re going?’

  The convict in front answered, her voice strangely accented. ‘Same way you were I reckon, but the clavies locked us out.’

  ‘You got any sort of plan?’ Vahn called as he ran.

  It was the convict behind who answered. ‘Didn’t get that far. You coming along sort of interrupted us.’

  Vahn would be having words with the man once they were clear of immediate danger. Angry shouts came from the tunnel entrance but Vahn guessed the pursuers had realised they had little chance of catching up with the fleeing convicts in the confines of the tunnel. As the group ran on the sounds of pursuit faded away until Vahn was reasonably sure they were safe.

  ‘Wait,’ Vahn shouted as he slowed to a halt. ‘We need to get our bearings.’

  The tunnel bored onwards in a straight line, its walls lined with ancient pipe work and long-decayed cabling. The floor was under an inch of chemical spill and what little illumination lit the convicts’ path was afforded by a combination of barely working lumen bulbs as old as the complex and the faint luminescence of the polluted liquid.

  ‘Where are we?’ said Vahn. ‘Somewhere north of Honourius?’

  The female convict he had spoken to earlier appeared from the shadows. She sported a mohican dyed acid green and her mouth and nose was covered with a matt black rebreather. The mask and general demeanour marked her out as one of the so-called chem-dogs, an anarchic bunch Vahn had encountered long ago in what seemed like a previous life. How she had ended up on Furia Penitens he had no idea, given that her home world of Savlar was itself one huge penal facility. ‘Must be,’ she said, her voice sounding through the grilles on her mask. ‘But we don’t know where this tunnel leads.’

  Another convict stepped forward into the light. The man had the martial bearing of a former Guardsman, as did many of the convicts from carceri chamber Absolutio. ‘It leads either to the spire or t
o Carceri Honourius,’ he said. ‘Either way, we need to keep moving.’

  ‘Wait up,’ said Vahn as he read the tensions in the group. Whoever these convicts were they hadn’t been together long and they didn’t have much of a plan. ‘Have you heard anything from Honourius? Has it fallen too?’

  The two convicts glanced uncertainly at one another and a third stepped forward. The man was short and wiry, his hair close-cropped and by the scab on the side of his head he’d recently lost an ear. ‘All we’ve heard is the proclamations from the colonel,’ he said. ‘He’s demanding the entire complex follows his orders, else we all get fed to the sump.’

  ‘Then we have to get out,’ said Vahn. ‘I’m not following that bastard and his murderous goons.’

  ‘Then it’s the spire,’ the woman said, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘Vestibule 16,’ said Vahn.

  ‘And if that’s barred too?’ said the big man behind Vahn.

  ‘Then we find another way in.’

  And with that, Argusti Vahn assumed command of a handful of convicts desperate to escape the madness of an entire penitentiary installation consumed by the bloodiest uprising in its history.

  THREE

  Bridgehead

  The trek from the site of the wrecked drop-ship to the regimental deployment area was a hard one, and it took Commissar Flint and the survivors of his staff section all night to complete. The men had remained sullenly quiet throughout most of the journey, and when they had spoken it had generally been to grumble incoherently in the Vostroyan dialect. Flint was well used to serving alongside Imperial Guardsmen drawn from different planets with different cultures, and he was well capable of unpicking the meaning of unfamiliar terms, most of them stemming from a common tongue. The word khekk was uttered frequently, an obvious Vostroyan curse, as was chevek, a term Flint suspected was being used to refer to him and meant something like ‘stranger’ or ‘unwelcome’. A dark glance at the last man to have spoken it had forestalled any further use of the term, earning a resentful silence from the provosts that lasted several hours.

  Night time on Furia Penitens was, they soon discovered, cold and windswept, the stiff breeze carrying a sharp, chemical taint the like of which Flint had only ever encountered on far more developed planets. He knew it to be the result of the power generation processes utilised in the massive penal generatorium of Alpha Penitentia, whereby a cocktail of liquids were pumped down into the bedrock at high pressure, where they were heated by the highly irradiated minerals far below. When those liquids were returned to the surface they were equally radioactive and the arcane systems of the generatoria utilised them as a relatively stable form of fuel. The one thing Flint had been unable to fathom was the purpose of the entire enterprise. There was nothing that needed the power Alpha Penitentia produced – the prisoners might as well be breaking rocks.

  Around midnight, Flint had been gripped by an unsettling sensation, one he hadn’t felt since his storm trooper detachment had been ambushed by dominators in the rad-zones of Obediah Nine. Within ten minutes he was certain of it – they were being observed. Whoever it was, they were keeping their distance, but certainly, someone or something was out there in the barren wastes, tracking the small group’s progress through the night.

  ‘Mutants, sir,’ Corporal Bukin stated coldly, his gruff voice low and conspiratorial.

  ‘What?’ said Flint, his eyes fixed on the shadowy rocks and craters that dotted the land. Any one of them could be hiding an ambusher.

  ‘Can’t you smell them, sir?’ Bukin growled. ‘Mutants, I know it.’

  ‘How do you know it?’ Flint replied.

  It was a few more steps before Bukin replied, his grizzled face scanning the wastes as he appeared to choose his words carefully. ‘This regiment might be new to war, commissar. But I am not.’

  ‘So you served in the Vostroyan defence forces,’ Flint replied. ‘So did every other trooper. You have particular experience?’

  ‘I do,’ Bukin cast a dark glance towards the commissar as he spoke. His scarred face appeared even more lined in that moment, though it may have been a trick of the gloomy ambient light. ‘I was not always in the militias, sir. I served the Techtriarchs in… other ways before I was indentured.’

  Something in the chief provost’s tone made Flint slow to a stop and round on the other man. ‘If there’s something I need to know about your past, Corporal Bukin, you had better tell me now, before things get unpleasant. Out with it.’

  The other provosts halted behind Bukin, while Kohlz stopped behind Flint. This was no place to be having a confrontation, not if they were being shadowed, but Flint was well aware he had to stamp his authority on these men, right now, or the balance of power would be perilously skewed.

  The cold wind whipped Bukin’s long moustaches across his grox-ugly face as the man glowered back at Flint, clearly weighing up how, or even if, to respond. A number of his fellows shifted uncomfortably, and Flint knew exactly what they were thinking. Who would doubt them if they claimed the regiment’s newly appointed commissar had perished in the crash, sucked through the wound in its side that had claimed several of their own number. Evidently, Kohlz saw it too, the aide’s stance suddenly tense.

  ‘I was known for a hunter, for a killer, of men and of mutants in the ruined factoriums of Vostroya.’

  That made sense. With much of Vostroya’s surface turned over to the sprawling manufactory complexes of its armaments industry, entire regions must fall from use and come to be infested with outcasts of all types. Men such as Bukin were needed, and they were paid handsomely for every mutant or recidivist hide they brought back from the ruins.

  ‘I’ve killed too,’ said Flint, his steely gaze fixed on Bukin’s. ‘Men, mutants and other things you should pray you never have to see. I’ve faced orks, tellarians and dominators and I’m still here to talk about it. Plenty of things have tried to kill me, Corporal Bukin, but none have managed it yet. Understood?’

  Bukin glanced sullenly off into the wastes, then back at Flint. ‘It’s gone now,’ he said flatly.

  ‘I said,’ Flint snarled, ‘Understood?’

  ‘I understand, Commissar Flint,’ Bukin replied as the wind stirred once more.

  ‘Good,’ said Flint. ‘Now, what’s gone?’

  ‘The stinking things that were tracking us, commissar. You scared them off, I think…’

  ‘Good,’ said Flint. ‘Let’s get moving before they change their mind.’

  It was sunrise the next morning before Flint and his section arrived at the drop zone. The regiment’s vehicles were mustered in a huge, chaotic laager out on the flats in front of the prison complex, and the weary group had seen the landing ships departing around midnight. The sound of more than a hundred armoured transports jostling into position had rolled across the wastes and the stink of their exhaust hung heavy in the air. When he saw automated perimeter defences in the form of Tarantula sentry guns tracking back and forth for a target, Flint called for a halt. Soon, a Sentinel walker clanked over the rim of a wide, shallow crater, the heavy bolter mounted on the side of its enclosed cockpit locked menacingly on them. After a moment, a side hatch popped and swung outwards, the pilot leaning out to look down at Flint.

  ‘Commissar?’ he said, looking over the ragged group.

  ‘Genius,’ growled Katko, one of Bukin’s provosts who had remained sullenly quiet for the entire trek.

  Flint felt no need to confirm the pilot’s insightful observation. ‘Point us towards regimental command and carry on, dragoon.’

  ‘Straight ahead, sir,’ the pilot responded, emphasising the direction with a wave. Flint dismissed the sentry and led the group off in the direction of the command post. As he walked, he observed the various units that made up the 77th Firstborn, Chimera armoured transports grinding forward into something only vaguely resembling a regimental deployment.

  ‘Corporal Bukin,’ he said, the man increasing his pace to catch up. He nodded towards the
scene of two Chimeras faced off bow to bow against one another, the commanders standing in the hatches and each yelling at the other to give way. ‘This deployment is distinctly sub optimal. Get it in order, now.’

  Corporal Bukin grinned nastily and offered his version of a salute before striding off in the direction of the confrontation with his provosts in tow. Flint had no idea whether or not Bukin or any of his crew were rated as marshals or banksmen. Frankly, it was more about authority and the ability to bang heads together than organisational skill.

  ‘Kohlz?’ said Flint. ‘You can stay, if you can find another vox.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Kohlz, grinning. ‘I’ll catch up with you at the command post’

  In a moment Kohlz was dashing off to find the regimental quartermaster’s post and Flint was alone. Resuming his walk towards the command post Flint studied the activity all around. With Bukin and his cronies now marshalling the Chimeras something resembling order was slowly imposing itself on the formerly chaotic activity. The provosts appeared amongst the worst disciplined of the regiment but they knew how to impose their will on others, making them ideal staffers for a commissar. The roar of engines filled the air as armoured transports were marshalled into company columns, which in turn were divided into platoon groups. The regiment consisted of five Chimera-borne armoured infantry companies, each made up of four or five platoons, in addition to the headquarters and the support companies. It was an impressive sight, though Flint had witnessed entire army groups deployed for battle at the outset of the Gethsemane campaign.