Dead Men Walking

by Steve Lyons

  He remembered:

  A rounder, fresher face, a more naïve face, reflected in the blank eyepieces of a Death Korps watchmaster. The engines of the PDF flyer whining, sending vibrations through the troop compartment and through the bench on which Gunthar sat, rattling his bones. The watchmaster had asked what he knew of Arex’s whereabouts. He had confessed only to what Weber had told him, pretended not to know her, but he had feared the Krieg man could see through his lies.

  He had half-expected the Governor to meet them on the space port ramp, had wondered if he could lie to him too, but the bad news had been voxed ahead, Hanrik was grieving for his niece in private, and suddenly nobody had time to spare for Gunthar any more, he was just one more refugee among so many thousands.

  He remembered:

  He had decided to join the Planetary Defence Force. Well, rather, he had almost made up his mind to join when an uptight lieutenant had collared him and demanded to know why he was out of uniform. He had had to explain that he had only just arrived, hadn’t known about the draft but had fully intended to speak to someone about it soon. The next thing he knew, a heavyset sergeant was taking a razor to his hair, and he was being kitted out in boots too small for him and a tunic too large.

  It was on that day that, to all intents and purposes, he had ceased to be mine overseer Gunthar and had become Trooper Soreson instead, but he hadn’t mourned the loss of that part of himself, not then. He had remembered his vow to return to the city, and had felt like this was the first step towards that goal. He had felt empowered.

  He remembered:

  A blur of push-ups and pull-ups, four-kilometre runs and ten-kilometre marches. Drill instructors screaming themselves hoarse, but rarely at him. Gunthar had felt a certain pride in the fact that, contrary to the expectations of a fat recruitment sergeant six years ago, he was considered one of the more promising trainees. Perhaps this was because, unlike most of the others, he knew what he was doing here.

  He learned military codes of conduct, vehicle and weapon recognition, basic first aid, survival skills and how to make up his bunk. He practised with a lasgun – though he hadn’t yet been issued with his own – until he could strip it down and reassemble it in less than two minutes. His marksmanship was poor to begin with, but Gunthar practised on the makeshift range at the foot of the space port hill until he could at least hit the plasterboard target with two shots out of three.

  He remembered:

  The first time a Krieg officer had observed a drill session on the ramp, coldly, inscrutably. He had soon pivoted on his heel and left, but returned the next day with a comrade. Two days after that, a Krieg watchmaster had assisted with the training regime, just offering the occasional suggestion to begin with but, by evening, giving the orders. Quite clearly, the PDF instructors resented this encroachment upon their territory, but it seemed there was little they could do about it.

  The next morning, there had been a watchmaster supervising at the range, another taking morning inspection, and by the end of the week Gunthar had had as many Krieg instructors as he had had non-Krieg ones.

  That was when the ten-kilometre marches became twenty, the trainees’ backpacks filled with stones to simulate the weight of equipment they didn’t have. First muster was brought forward an hour, then another, evidently to the surprise of some PDF sergeants, who turned up bleary-eyed, late. Exercises frequently endured beyond sunset, and Gunthar became used to subsisting on four hours’ sleep per night. He never joined in the grumbling that went on in the bunkroom before lights out, but even he couldn’t always meet the exacting new standards required of him.

  The Krieg men never raised their voices in anger. They spoke in quiet, measured tones, laden with threat, and were quick to dispense extra duties to recruits who disappointed them. ‘You aren’t training to fight old ladies and crippled mutants anymore,’ a masked Guardsman growled in Gunthar’s ear once. ‘You are training to fight with the Death Korps of Krieg, and I intend to make sure you are worthy of that honour, else you will be wasting the life you have been given.’

  Another instructor, addressing Gunthar’s whole platoon, told how at the age of twelve he had been given a lasgun and sent into a rad-zone to hunt down mutants, a mission from which a third of his squad had not returned and the least of those men had been more able, more dedicated to his cause, than any of these weak, apathetic wastes of genetic material that currently cowered before him.

  In the bunkroom one morning, a watchmaster demanded forty push-ups from a trainee whose boots weren’t sufficiently polished. The trainee was a burly miner in his mid-thirties, more able than most to cope with the physical demands placed upon him, but lack of sleep had made him increasingly fractious – he had been the first to complain each night about the depredations of the day – and this was the final straw.

  He had refused the order. He had screamed in the watchmaster’s face, demanding to know who he thought he was, reminding him that this wasn’t his world. And, without a warning, without a word, the watchmaster had drawn his laspistol and executed him.

  There was some expectation of fallout from that incident, rumours that complaints had been taken to the Governor-General himself, and for a few days it did seem there were fewer Krieg facemasks around than there had been. Then Colonel Braun had addressed the trainees, informed them stiffly that the watchmaster had acted by the book, and that was that. The facemasks returned in force, and everything was as it had been before, except that Gunthar’s bunkroom was now very quiet at night.

  He remembered:

  Lectorum sessions had been transformed too. Now, the greater part of each was devoted to the learning by rote and communal recital of the Emperor’s benedictions. Gunthar was taught that his officers were the Emperor, as far as he was concerned, and that to question a lawful order was the foulest kind of blasphemy.

  Trainees were addressed only as numbers now, punished for the merest mentions of their old names. Gunthar was made to run around the space port three times with his rock-filled backpack for carelessly referring to himself as ‘I’ instead of as ‘this trooper’, and received an additional lap for being too slow. It was decreed that some of the trainees had become too comfortable with each other, so the platoons were reformed to split up old friends and new comrades alike.

  That was how Gunthar had ceased to be Trooper Soreson and become Trooper 1419 instead, but he hadn’t really minded this either. He felt he was beginning to understand what it meant to be a soldier, and he shouldered that burden, accepted his new identity, because he knew that a soldier was what Arex needed him to be.

  He remembered:

  A frost-sprinkled field, the air crisp with the threat of approaching winter. Gunthar’s platoon had been marched to Thelonius City and most of the way back and they were expecting a meal break. Instead, their instructor, a senior Krieg Guardsman, separated them into two groups and told them to fight each other.

  The trainees were reluctant at first, but a few growled warnings, a twitch of a hand towards a lasgun holster, and they began to grapple half-heartedly. A promise of additional rations for the winning team, to be taken from the losers’ allocation, stirred a little more passion in them, and Gunthar’s legs were kicked out from beneath him by a dough-faced colossus of a man twice his age.

  Before he could stand, before he could fight back, the instructor called a halt to the proceedings. He had a few words to say, naturally, on the subject of the trainees’ efforts, before deciding that a demonstration was in order. He hauled a young man out of the ranks and ordered him to put up his fists. The trainee did so with a certain reticence, and the instructor came at him like a Leman Russ Demolisher.

  Gunthar winced as the instructor hammered punch after punch into the trainee’s chin and, when he brought up his hands to protect this, into his stomach. He snarled at the man to defend himself, to forget his assailant’s rank and fight back, but the trainee was slow to respond and, although he did eventually make a spirited attempt to wrest
le the instructor to the ground, by then he was already too dazed, too bruised to fight effectively. An elbow thrust into the trainee’s leg dislocated his kneecap, and the trainee was on the ground but the masked instructor continued to beat him, methodically, dispassionately, until he was bleeding and unconscious.

  ‘And that,’ he announced, hardly out of breath, ‘is the level of commitment I expect to see from each of you, unless you wish to spar with me.’

  This time, when the fighting began, Gunthar looked for the dough-faced man, and found him engaged in a scrum in which Gunthar’s team-mates were outnumbered. He gripped his adversary’s shoulder from behind, spinning him around as he yanked him from the fray, and he punched him, but not hard enough, still holding back. A flailing arm caught him in the face. He doubled over, and the dough-faced man rushed him, using his superior weight to bear Gunthar to the cold, hard ground again.

  ‘Don’t be squeamish about striking from behind,’ bellowed the instructor, perhaps at Gunthar himself. ‘This is not a jousting tournament, this is war!’

  He was right, and Gunthar felt angry with himself for his mistake, angry too at the dough-faced man for taking advantage of it. That may not have been fair of him, but it was surprising how easy it was to hate this man, this comrade of a few minutes earlier, for embarrassing him, for standing between Gunthar and his life’s only goal.

  ‘Leave him!’ the instructor barked, though at whom Gunthar couldn’t see. ‘He has a medi-pack, he can take care of himself, and if he can’t…’

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence. If a trooper can’t take care of himself, he is useless to us. Gunthar was pinned down, a podgy fist raised to hammer into his head, but the memory of Arex gave him strength to wrench a hand free and to lash out. Taken by surprise, the dough-faced man was unbalanced, and Gunthar heaved him away, rolled nimbly to his feet and ducked a retaliatory lunge.

  ‘If you aren’t trying to kill each other, you aren’t trying hard enough.’

  Two trainees seized Gunthar from behind, holding him as the dough-faced man came in for another attack. Instead of trying to evade him, this time Gunthar met him with feet firmly planted and head lowered. He butted the dough-faced man in the jaw, the impact sending both of them reeling but surprising one of Gunthar’s captors enough to shake his grip. Gritting his teeth, focusing through a crowd of blotches in his vision, Gunthar thrust an elbow backwards into his other captor’s stomach and dropped to one knee, throwing the startled, grey-haired recruit over his shoulder.

  He surrendered to the moment, then, unable to stop, to think, to plan in the midst of an increasingly fierce melee, just responding to each threat as it presented itself, defending his allies when he could. At one point, he rammed an opponent shoulder-first, at the same moment that he was similarly attacked from the opposite direction, and Gunthar felt the snap of his victim’s clavicle as he fell with a shriek of pain.

  It was so much easier, he thought, when he didn’t know their names.

  He was barely aware of the melee thinning out about him. When the instructor blew his whistle, Gunthar swayed on his feet and saw, numbly, that only he and three of his team-mates remained standing. The field was filled with the groans of the wounded and, as the adrenaline drained out of his system, he didn’t know whether to feel ashamed or proud of himself. He settled on feeling neither, because he had only done what he had been instructed to do. Gunthar was becoming the man he had to be, and if only he had been that man before, Arex would have been saved by now.

  Nor, of course, was he complimented on his achievement. The Krieg instructor toured the field, and delivered swift kicks to those awake and, in his view, capable of rising who had not yet done so. He had the platoon improvise stretchers for the rest, several of whom would certainly be in no fit state to fight for a month or two.

  They must have presented a motley sight as they limped back to the space port, because a trainee squad on the shooting range, a cluster of refugees on the hill, a non-Krieg lieutenant taking drill on the ramp, all turned to gape at them. Gunthar didn’t doubt that questions would be asked about today’s events behind closed doors, just as he felt he knew what the answers would be.

  He went to bed with a buzzing head that night, and his ribs were sore for a few days after, but never once did it occur to him to complain about his treatment.

  He had learned a great deal, that day in the

  frost-coated field, more he felt than on all the previous days of his training in total. He had found something inside of himself, and to Gunthar that discovery was well worth a few temporary aches and pains.

  It wasn’t on that day that his left eye had come by its purple bruise.

  He remembered:

  He hadn’t enjoyed the meeting in the colonel’s office.

  He had felt privileged, at first, to be invited, then uncomfortable because it had been the old Gunthar they had wanted, not Trooper 1419, and being made to remember his old life had only filled him with regret. Still, the meeting had brought him a good step closer to his goal. A few more days now.

  He was excused from training for a day, given a small desk in a corner of the Governor-General’s office and a pile of data-slates containing old maps of the mine tunnels. He tried to cast his mind back, to remember the updated maps in his office, but he couldn’t seem to make his drawings match the vague shapes in his head. It didn’t help that Hanrik fussed about him so, and Gunthar was relieved when Colonel Braun appeared and asked to see his commanding officer in private.

  Gunthar rose to leave, but Hanrik waved him back into his seat; he and the colonel would step outside to talk instead. The gesture weighed on Gunthar’s shoulders, impressing upon him how vital his task was, and he redoubled his efforts. He couldn’t help but be distracted, however, by Hanrik and Braun’s voices, intermittently audible to him through the half-open door.

  ‘–third platoon this week. This time – fighting with sticks. I know we have discussed this before, sir, but I worry that–’

  ‘–appreciate your concerns, colonel, but my hands are–’

  ‘–fourteen more troopers in the medicae – next, I ask you? Live ammunition?’

  ‘–discussed this several times with Colonel 186, and he is of the opinion–’

  ‘–respect, sir, I understood that you retained command of the–’

  ‘–to work with these people.’ Hanrik sounded flustered. ‘We need them. We need their resources, their… their commitment, their experience of–’

  Braun mumbled something then that Gunthar didn’t catch. Hanrik’s tart reply, however, was perfectly clear. ‘We are fighting a war, Colonel Braun,’ he said, ‘and, in war, certain sacrifices have to be made.’ As he returned to his desk, however, the Governor-General looked anything but resolute on this point, burying his face in his hands until he remembered that he wasn’t alone, at which point he straightened his back and found some slatework to pretend to be doing.

  Gunthar’s report did nothing to improve Hanrik’s mood. His new plan of the mine tunnels was strewn with apologetic notes to indicate which of the revisions he was unsure of: most of them, as it happened. ‘How can I show this to the Krieg colonel?’ Hanrik carped. ‘He’ll think we are… You told me you could do this, Soreson. I put my neck on the line for you, and you… You’ve failed me!’

  The old Gunthar wanted to protest. Not only had he done his best, he had been honest with Hanrik from the start about his doubts, only to have them brushed aside. Trooper 1419, however, just stood to attention and said, ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

  ‘I need this doing again,’ snapped Hanrik, thrusting the data-slate into Gunthar’s stomach. ‘I can’t send a hundred men underground on the basis of this guesswork. I’m sure, if you were one of those men, you wouldn’t be too–’

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ stammered Gunthar. ‘I thought… That is to say, this trooper had hoped he would… I had assumed I would be joining Commissar Costellin’s team.’

  Hanrik shook his hea
d. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘You’re an administrator, Soreson, and it seems you can’t even do that job well. How many times have you even been down a mine?’

  ‘Three, sir. Just three. But I…’ Gunthar felt panic welling up inside him. ‘I have to go back, sir. I swore I would go back. For her.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hanrik gruffly, and a light seemed to dim in his eyes. ‘We all feel that way, Soreson. We’ve all lost someone, but the chances of…’ He swallowed. ‘You’ll get your chance, when your training is complete. To fight for this woman… In the meantime… In the meantime, I think we should leave this mission to the Krieg. They seem to know what they’re doing, and I… I think…’

  ‘It’s Arex, sir,’ Gunthar blurted out, because in that desperate moment he truly thought it would make a difference. ‘It’s your niece. I swore I would go back for her. She was at my hab-block, looking for me. I have to find her!’

  Hanrik’s expression froze on his face. His ruddy cheeks paled. ‘How… how do you know my…?’ he stammered, and Gunthar knew he had said too much.

  It took a moment for the truth to sink in with the governor-general, for him to be sure. Then, Hanrik’s eyes flashed, and he curled his right hand into a fist and drove an anger-fuelled punch into Gunthar’s left eye, snapping his head around. Still standing to attention, Gunthar had seen the blow coming but hadn’t tried to avoid it.

  Hanrik turned away from him, his head bowed, breathing deeply to calm himself, nursing his skinned knuckles, and for an endless minute, no further words were spoken. Then, without turning, Hanrik said quietly, ‘Perhaps you could track down some of the mine foremen, see if any of them survived.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Show them the plans you have drawn up so far, and see what they can add to them.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Gunthar. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  The bunkroom was waking behind Gunthar, trainees scrambling to prepare their bunks, their uniforms, themselves, for inspection. All of them needing the single basin, shouting for him to get a move on.