Commissar

by Andy Hoare

  SIX

  Integration

  ‘So what is this?’ snarled Corporal Skane. ‘You pulled us out just to torture us?’

  ‘Relax, corporal,’ said Flint. ‘No one said anything about torture. We just need to ask you some questions.’

  Having extracted the convicts from the complex, Flint had brought them back to the regimental laager. Despite the fatigue and the post-battle comedown, Flint had known that he would have to segregate the convicts from the regiment until things could be squared with Aleksis, and so he had approached the intelligence chief, Major Herrmahn, and arranged the use of a number of habitents. The bulk of the liberated convict-workers were gathered in the largest, but Vahn, Becka and Skane had been separated and allocated a small side-chamber each. Flint had sensed that these three would have the most to tell him, whether they wanted to or not.

  Now, Skane was seated in the centre of the habitent chamber that Flint was using to interview each of the segregated workers, the sole illumination provided by a portable lumen unit hung directly overhead. Major Herrmahn stood cross-armed behind the convict while Bukin loitered near the entrance, his Vostroyan Mark III rested nonchalantly over his shoulder while he chewed on the stub of his cigar.

  ‘What questions?’ said Skane. ‘You said I wasn’t on any charge.’

  ‘And you’re not, corporal,’ said Flint. ‘But we went in there to spy out the lie of the land, and we ran into you. We need to know how the rebels took over, how many there are and where they are. Start with how.’

  Skane glanced around the bare habitent chamber, glowering at Bukin before looking back to Flint. ‘Colonel Strannik,’ Skane said. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Not personally,’ said Flint. Though he had tried to access the data-stack archives on the former colonel, Flint had been unable to penetrate the cipher-seal placed upon them. He had considered asking for Major Herrmahn’s help, but had decided against it until he knew the intelligence chief better. ‘What do you know about him?’

  Skane sighed, then answered, ‘He was commanding officer of one of your regiments,’ said Skane.

  ‘I’m Commissariat,’ Flint replied. ‘You mean Strannik was Firstborn?’

  Flint looked from Skane to Major Herrmahn, who shifted somewhat uncomfortably, then nodded subtly in confirmation.

  ‘Yes,’ said Skane. ‘I don’t know for sure what happened to him to end up in Penitentia, but there were sure some stories doing the rounds.’

  ‘I bet there were,’ said Flint, dismissing the comment. In all likelihood none of the stories Skane had heard bore any resemblance to the truth.

  ‘Can’t have been that bad though,’ Skane added. Flint raised his eyebrows in response, and Skane added, ‘Well, he wasn’t executed, was he?’

  That thought had crossed Flint’s mind too. In all his years as a commissar, he had never seen a senior Guard officer who had committed a punishable crime sentenced to imprisonment in any sort of penal facility. Those charged with cowardice, gross incompetence or corruption were generally executed on the spot, while those with the clout to avoid such a fate were normally able to pull in some sort of favour that got them well away from the source of the trouble and any likely ramifications. Some fell back on past relationships with other officers now in a more senior position, calling in favours and buying themselves cushy appointments on the general staff or some backwater garrison. Strannik ending up in Alpha Penitentia was suspect indeed.

  ‘What was he like?’ Flint pressed.

  ‘He ran the place like he was the governor,’ Skane replied. ‘Like it was his birthright.’

  ‘And the other convicts, they accepted this?’

  ‘Huh,’ said Skane. ‘They didn’t have any choice. Anyone that didn’t play along got strung from the upper galleries.’

  ‘And the wardens, the clavigers. They allowed this to happen?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Skane sneered. ‘They made it happen.’

  Flint saw Herrmahn shift again, as if he knew all this already and had no desire to hear it again.

  ‘How?’ said Flint. ‘And why?’

  ‘Commissar,’ Major Herrmahn interjected before Skane could answer. ‘Might I suggest we pursue this line of enquiry at a later juncture?’

  Flint nodded slowly, acceding to the intelligence chief’s request. Herrmahn was perhaps his only ally on the regiment’s staff, and not an officer he wanted to make an enemy of. Only by showing consideration to the convoluted politicking of the noble clans that dominated the region’s military would he have any chance of fulfilling his duty as regimental commissar. Then something occurred to him. As commanding officer of a regiment of the Vostroyan Firstborn, Strannik must be, or must have been at least, part of that complex network of bloodlines and patronage. Perhaps, Flint realised, Strannik was a member of the Anhalz Techtriarch clan.

  ‘Commissar?’ Skane interrupted his chain of thought. ‘We done here?’

  ‘For now,’ said Flint, ‘Yes, we’re done.’

  Bukin stirred himself by the portal, and led Skane back to his makeshift holding cell. ‘You want the next one?’ he asked.

  ‘Send in the Savlar,’ said Flint, consulting his data-slate, ‘Becka.’

  Flint continued the interviews late into the night and well into the early morning, taking advantage of the convicts’ fatigue to eke information out of them piece by piece without it seeming like an interrogation. He himself was well used to the technique and had little trouble staying alert even though he hadn’t rested in what seemed like days. Nevertheless, Flint kept Kohlz on hand to fetch numerous cups of recaff. Bukin had nodded off several times, but had turned down Flint’s suggestion he get an hour’s sleep, his nasty streak compelling him to watch over every questioning session.

  Becka turned out to be a former indentured labourer and erstwhile scum-ganger from the distant mining world of Savlar. While Flint hadn’t heard of the planet, Herrmahn and Bukin both had, and they filled in what details the archives couldn’t provide. Savlar’s mines were served by recidivists, petty criminals and their descendents, and its population was generally held to be one of the most undisciplined in the region. By Herrmahn’s account, the workers were so ungovernable they couldn’t even be trusted to serve in the Penal Legions of the Imperial Guard. Instead, they were subjected to a brutal regime in which they were given the choice of working or starving, yet some, Becka included, still managed to escape. Flint got little out of Becka regarding how she came to be interred in Alpha Penitentia having escaped her home world, and he let the matter go for the moment.

  He also discovered just why she wore her rebreather even when the atmosphere was perfectly breathable. The Savlars, it seemed, were forced to submit to their overseers’ rule by keeping them addicted to a low level narcotic rationed out in canisters and inhaled via the facemask. Becka had replaced the regularly rationed chemical with whatever bootleg she could obtain in the seediest depths of Alpha Penitentia. Far from recreational, the continuous inhaling of the drug was probably all that kept her functional.

  The Savlar had been unable to offer any more information on Colonel Strannik than Skane had and, in deference to Major Herrmahn, Flint hadn’t pressed the matter. Instead, he concentrated on her accounts of the uprising itself in order to get some idea of the events that had led to the outbreak of violence. He already knew from the briefing stacks that the uprising had been triggered when the Departmento Munitorum had ordered the installation to render up a portion of its inmates to serve in a new Penal Legion, to be fielded against warp-slaved rebels preying on the outlying marches of the Finial Sector. The claviger-wardens had gone straight to Colonel Strannik and informed him that he would be responsible for deciding which of his followers would serve and which would be spared, and the complex had immediately split into two factions – those who Strannik sought to condemn to servitude and death in the Penal Legion, and his favourites who would stay behind. Inevitably, those loyal to Strannik were also the strongest and most brutal of the convi
cts, while those outside of his influence were the powerless and outcast.

  Those Strannik consigned to the Penal Legion refused to serve, and driven to desperation rose up against him. The ensuing battle was brief but deadly, and within hours hundreds of Strannik’s enemies were dead, their broken corpses strung from the galleries and gantries of the carceri chambers. But the violence didn’t stop there, for the colonel’s followers took it upon themselves to punish all who weren’t allied to them. They initiated a purge of the entire convict-worker population in a week-long orgy of bloodletting and senseless violence.

  Perhaps realising that the violence would reduce the population so much that he would be unable to meet the Officio Munitorum’s demands for a newly raised Penal Legion, it appeared that Governor Kherhart ordered the claviger-wardens to put down the uprising and to separate the warring factions. But that proved a grievous mistake, and one that Flint considered sufficiently dire to justify the governor’s removal from office. Both sides turned on the wardens and the uprising entered a new and tragic phase. Within another week, the explosion of unfettered violence had resulted in the deaths of almost ninety per cent of the prison staff and untold thousands of the convicts themselves. The clavigers had been pushed back so that now they occupied the gate hall but no other parts of the complex, and as Flint knew only too well, the convicts had control of the defence batteries.

  Having obtained a graphic picture of the violence of the uprising from Becka, Flint dismissed her and ordered Vendell brought before him. As Bukin ushered the man into the makeshift interrogation chamber, Flint caught glares of mutual dislike, as if the two men had decided within seconds of laying eyes upon one another that they would be enemies. Bukin seemed to have that effect on some people.

  Flint’s questioning of Vendell revealed that he was from the world of Voyn’s Reach. Vendell had been a breacher in the 812th regiment of the world’s heavy assault units, and had got himself into trouble with the Commissariat soon after his regiment’s founding. In truth, Flint had neither the time nor the inclination to delve into the seedy details of every convict’s fall from grace. Instead, he focused on quizzing Vendell on his knowledge of the rebels’ numbers and dispositions. The Voyn’s Reacher offered his best guess on both counts, estimating Strannik’s followers to number in the thousands and that they were based in Carceri Resurecti, a generatoria chamber on the opposite side of the complex to the gate hall.

  A plan began to form in Flint’s mind as he questioned still more convicts. The ad hoc mission into the complex had achieved its objective, though not in the way Flint had originally intended. In liberating the convict-workers he had discovered more about the rebels than he may have been able to by way of a simple reconnaissance. Yet, it seemed that each convict he questioned had a different notion of the rebel’s capabilities and their true agenda. Solomon, the man Flint had encountered first in the tunnels leading to Carceri Didactio, seemed to think the rebels numbered in the hundreds of thousands and that the colonel was planning on taking over the entire world of Furia Penitens and proclaiming its secession from the Imperium with him as its king. It was clear to Flint that Solomon’s outlook was somewhat… limited.

  With Solomon dismissed and returned to the holding area, Bukin brought the last of the convicts, bar Vahn himself, before Flint. Hailing from the feudal world of Asgard, Stank, called ‘Rotten’ by his companions, was as ugly as Corporal Bukin and just as surly. The man was missing his right ear, the wound still angry and red, as Stank had clearly not had access to proper medicae facilities since losing it at some point during the uprising. Stank voiced his opinion that the uprising was hiding something far more sinister, something heretical and unclean. Though Flint couldn’t dismiss the possibility, he suspected that something of the culture of Stank’s home world was coming through, the myths and folklore of Asgard’s forest-dwelling communities retold and re-imagined through his exposure to the horrors of the galaxy at large. The conversation provided little in the way of genuinely useful information, but did serve to solidify Flint’s growing belief that another mission, in larger force and deeper into the penal generatorium complex was required.

  As Bukin ushered Stank away, Flint and Herrmahn were left alone in the starkly lit habitent chamber. Flint had kept an eye out for Herrmahn’s reaction whenever Colonel Strannik had been mentioned, and decided to broach the subject before Bukin returned with the last convict, Argusti Vahn.

  ‘We’ve questioned almost three-dozen convicts,’ Flint began. ‘And still we know little of this Colonel Strannik or his motivations.’

  ‘I would have thought you’d have guessed some of it by now, commissar.’ Herrmahn said. ‘You’ve certainly heard some truth amidst the nonsense these convicts have gabbled tonight.’

  ‘I believe I have,’ said Flint. ‘But I prefer to deal in facts. Strannik was Firstborn, yes? And I’m guessing that he is related to Governor Kherhart by way of the Techtriarchs of the Anhalz clan. Am I correct?’

  Herrmahn looked down at his feet as if considering how much of a truthful answer he should give. ‘You are correct in that much, commissar,’ he replied.

  ‘But there’s more, isn’t there,’ said Flint. It wasn’t a question. In his mind’s eye Flint could already see the labyrinthine genealogy chart spreading out before him, and he really didn’t like the look of where the lines were meeting, or who they were joining together.

  Herrmahn sighed. ‘Yes, commissar, there is more. But it has to come direct from…’

  ‘Last one, commissar,’ said Corporal Bukin as he led Argusti Vahn into the habitent chamber.

  Vahn was wiry to the point of emaciation, though Flint suspected that even in better times he was prone to leanness. His hair was formed into waist-long dreadlocks and his intense eyes gleamed with an almost feral light from the midst of his filthy face. Vahn wore a ragged assortment of clothes combining the basic uniform all of the convicts were issued upon their incarceration with whatever scraps he had obtained since, crudely stitched together in a fashion that reminded Flint of the attire worn by the hardcore of the Gethsemane rebels.

  Despite Vahn’s vagabond appearance, Flint could tell there was something more to the convict. He had after all asserted himself as leader of the refugee group, and apart from a few underlying tensions most of them appeared to have accepted him in that station. As a commissar it was one of Flint’s duties to be aware of the ebb and flow of informal power that sloshed around Imperial Guard units, and the majority of the convicts he had questioned so far appeared to be ex-Guard, planetary defence force or militia. Even those like Becka who hadn’t served in a formal sense had probably run with the hyper-violent gangs they grew up around.

  ‘So,’ Flint said to Vahn, gesturing for him to sit in the chair in the centre of the chamber. ‘What’s your story?’

  Vahn cast a suspicious glance at the seat. Seeing that it was nothing more threatening than a standard-issue folding camp chair and therefore no immediate threat he sat, though he remained obviously distrustful of his surroundings.

  ‘My story?’ said Vahn. ‘Can’t really say I have one, commissar.’

  Flint’s eyes narrowed and he folded his arms across his chest. ‘Come on, Vahn,’ he replied. ‘Everyone’s got a story. Let’s hear something of yours. Where you’re from, for a start.’

  Vahn snorted as if recalling a joke he had heard a long time ago. ‘I’m from Alpha Penitentia, commissar. You?’

  Flint didn’t answer straight away, but scanned Vahn for any scrap of a clue he could use to his advantage. Vahn’s arms were bare and covered in an intricate tracery of tattoos. Those on the right arm were fairly standard for many Imperial Guardsmen, depicting holy images and reams of votive text. Those on the left were less standard and of a more lascivious nature, but not unlike those sported by long-serving Imperial Navy ratings. Was Vahn either of these?

  ‘Originally?’ said Flint, going along with it to gain some degree of common ground, ‘Orana, more or less. Then Pr
ogenium and the storm trooper regiment based out of Cirillo Prime.’ Vahn looked blankly back at him, as if he hadn’t heard of the place Flint’s company had been based for the best part of three years. ‘Then the Commissariat, and eventually Gethsemane.’

  Still nothing. Vahn shrugged, unimpressed by Flint’s credentials. Perhaps the direct approach would work better, he thought.

  ‘I’m assuming you weren’t born in the generatorium,’ said Flint. Though tinged with sarcasm, the question hardly stretched credulity. Those penal facilities that didn’t segregate the sexes or enforce routine sterilisation might have substantial populations of inmates born into incarceration, literally condemned for the sins of their fathers. Flint doubted this was so in Vahn’s case however.

  ‘No,’ said Vahn, his expression suggesting he found the suggestion mildly insulting. ‘I wasn’t born in that place.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Flint. There was definitely something about Vahn that made Flint suspicious, though he wasn’t any closer to uncovering just what it might be. Perhaps changing the subject would uncover more details hidden between the lines. ‘We’re here to flush this whole place clean, purge these rebels and restore order. I need your help.’

  Vahn’s eyes flashed to Flint’s as the commissar seated himself opposite the prisoner. ‘How so?’ said Vahn.

  ‘We need to know what we’re up against,’ said Flint. ‘We’ve spoken to all of your people, but we’re not getting much of any use.’

  Vahn smiled at that, then said, ‘I’m not surprised. Most of them had never left their own carceri chamber before the uprising. The complex is a big place, commissar, and a lot goes on most Emperor-fearing people really wouldn’t want to know about.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Flint replied, pleased to be getting somewhere at last. ‘And we’re here to stop it.’ Then, he added, ‘To stop him.’

  ‘You mean the colonel,’ said Vahn flatly.

  ‘I do,’ Flint replied. ‘I mean to execute him by my own hand.’