by Steve Lyons
Drop-ships had been sent to three spaceports around the globe. Even so, some people had been cut from the rescue list because they couldn’t reach any of those ports in time. Arex had listened to Commissar Mannheim of the Krieg 42nd, arguing over a comm-link terminal with an indignant nobleman who had his own landing pad and didn’t see why he and his family couldn’t be picked up from there.
Everything had been done in such a rush. The Krieg generals wouldn’t delay the departure of their troop ship even for an hour. Mannheim had mumbled something about their generosity in agreeing to take aboard refugees in the first place, but Arex knew that such finer feelings had nothing to do with it.
They had been sent to a disused office to wait, she and Tylar, with Mannheim looking in on them when he could. The window looked out over the space port ramp, and they watched as two drop-ships were loaded up with vehicles and equipment including, according to Mannheim, a crate of the Governor’s belongings salvaged from the High Spire. The commissar sidled up behind them, followed their gazes, and sighed. ‘We arrived in four,’ he lamented.
Trouble broke out as soon as the first proctor and PDF vehicles were sighted. Arex heard the swell of angry voices from outside and knew what was happening before the news had reached Mannheim’s comm-bead. ‘Apparently,’ he reported, ‘the crowd out there is still growing. We’ve issued warnings, asked them to stay at home, told them we can’t do anything for them here, but they keep on coming.’
‘Can you blame them?’ said Arex.
‘I suppose not,’ Mannheim conceded, ‘but there aren’t enough of your proctors to cope, and it sounds like…’ He cocked his head, listening to another transmission.
‘And what about those who have lost their homes?’
‘Some of the proctors are even joining the rioters. Don’t worry, I’m sure we can…’
‘They’ve been waiting for months to be helped.’
‘Colonel 103 has sent out a couple of platoons. That ought to defuse the situation.’
The sound of las-fire made Arex wince. Less than five minutes later, however, the first PDF truck came rolling into the port, accompanied by an escort of masked Guardsmen and, surging in its wake, a wave of dispossessed humanity. Another Krieg platoon moved forward, formed a line to block the latter, parting only to allow a second truck through, then a third and a fourth. The vehicles mounted the first drop-ship’s loading ramp, intending to disgorge their passengers inside the belly of that metal hulk rather than exposing them to the mob without.
‘We’ll be just like them,’ said Arex quietly, ‘on the next world. They’ll have their own lords there. Our fathers’ names, and the ranks they held, won’t mean all that much anymore. We’ll just be two more refugees, two more mouths to feed, and if they can find a home for us at all, it will surely be on one of the lowest floors.’
Tylar put his arm around her, drew her close to him. ‘We’ll survive,’ he said.
More trucks were arriving below, and now Mannheim cleared his throat politely and Arex and Tylar turned to find four Guardsmen waiting for them at the door. It was time for them to leave too.
Arex hesitated, glancing back at the window, and Mannheim rushed to assure her she would be well protected down there, that the drop-ship was only a very short walk away, but that wasn’t what was bothering her. ‘There’ll be more ships,’ Tylar said to her, and Arex forced a brave smile onto her face and chose to believe him.
As they crossed the room, her foot struck an open zip case, upsetting its contents. Looking down, she saw a handful of hololiths peeking out from a stack of clothing. Four young men, resplendent in dress uniforms. She wondered who they were.
Watching the bedlam on the space port ramp from afar had not prepared Arex for the shock of being thrust into it. She couldn’t see where she was going, couldn’t hear the instructions that were shouted to her. She could only keep her head down, keep as close to Tylar as she could, trust in the Krieg Guardsmen to form a protective shell around her as she stumbled along between them.
She almost wished she had accepted Mannheim’s suggestion of covering herself with a blanket, concealing her identity. This morning, she had been hailed as a hero, as a symbol of hope. Now, she was a deserter, a traitor. She would have felt dishonest, however, fleeing under a cloak of anonymity. She would have felt cowardly.
They were through the hostile crowd at last, and through the Death Korps’ cordon, a ramp extended invitingly before them. As they climbed it, something – a plastek container – struck Arex on the back of the head, and Tylar looked around, scowling, for the culprit as he brushed food paste from her hair.
She faltered on the threshold of the drop-ship’s loading bay, turned back, couldn’t leave like that. She wanted to say something, felt she ought to explain herself. She was greeted by a sea of a thousand enraged faces, and she knew no one would want to hear her words. Tylar slipped an arm about her shoulders again and gave her strength as he always did, coaxed her out of that dreadful moment.
Arex gave a final, tearful sigh, and she allowed him to guide her away from there, away from the only life she had ever known, towards an uncertain new one.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The necrons were on the move again.
Gunthar was woken by the news being shouted around the space port. Reactions ran the full range from hysterical screaming to weeping to silent acceptance. It wasn’t as if nobody had known this was coming. How long had they been waiting now?
Gunthar felt cold, and wrapped his threadbare blanket tighter about himself. He didn’t know how long he had slept, sitting upright against a hangar wall, his knees drawn up to his chest leaving room for another refugee to sprawl at his feet. His neck muscles had become accustomed to this position and no longer ached so much.
How long had it been since the soldiers had left? Weeks? Months? He had stopped counting the days. The rise and fall of the sun meant nothing to him, a device to impose some structure upon a life that no longer had a use for one. Gunthar slept when he had to now, when his exhausted body had no option but to shut down. He didn’t dream that way. He ate when he could find food, which wasn’t often.
He did his best not to picture her face.
He remembered that last day, fooling himself he still had a purpose, helping with crowd control, keeping the refugees from the drop-ships, at least trying to. His uniform, his rank, had ceased to mean much in that fraught situation. He had had no gun, so he had been trying to make his voice heard in vain.
He had heard her name, and the sound of it had been a jolt to his heart. He had thought himself mistaken at first, until he had heard it again, spoken with venom, and he had realised then… She had been so close, all this time, one of the very evacuees he had been striving to protect, and Gunthar hadn’t known, hadn’t even wondered.
He had elbowed his way to the front of the crowd, all thoughts of duty forgotten, and he had seen her there. For the first time in a lifetime, he had seen her.
Arex. She was climbing the ramp to the rescue ship, surrounded by Krieg Guardsmen, and he cried out to her but she didn’t hear him. She was walking away from him, two footsteps away from walking out of his life forever, but the Emperor must have heard his prayers because she stopped. She turned. She looked directly at Gunthar, and she looked exactly as he remembered her, her round face, green eyes and chestnut brown hair. He started towards her, found himself blocked by the Krieg cordon. He tried to explain himself, pleaded with them, but they wouldn’t listen to him. Eight hours ago, they had been his allies. They were strangers now.
Arex wasn’t alone. Gunthar hadn’t noticed before, but now a blond, muscular man was brushing her hair, putting his arm around her, and she hadn’t seen Gunthar at all. She had eyes only for this new man, this man who was taking her away from him. He watched them go, disappearing into the drop-ship, and he thought that perhaps it was best that way. He was pleased, he told himself. Against all odds, he had achieved his life’s only goal. Arex was safe. She would be happy.
>
They could never have been together anyway. They had always known it.
Everyone had supposed the space port to be the necrons’ next target. Many had fled, tried to get as far from Hieronymous City as they could, to delay the inevitable. Even as they had left, more people had arrived to replace them, still praying for a rescue but less fervently so with each new day and each fresh disappointment. Gunthar knew the truth: that it didn’t matter what they did, which path they chose.
He rested his head on the wall again, closed his eyes, wondered if he would have the willpower to keep them closed when the slaughter began. He didn’t need to see death coming. He couldn’t close his ears, however, and fate dealt him one final surprise in the form of a rumour that began as a whisper but grew into a shout. The necrons, he heard through the hubbub around him, weren’t coming here after all.
They were skirting the hill, following the road around to richer pickings. Thousands of them. No, tens of thousands. Gunthar found it incredible that they could ever have been contained, even for a short time. They were free now though.
It was night-time – inside the electric-lit port, he hadn’t known – but the necron army was bathed in a sickly green glow. It emanated from the chambers of their guns, the hatchways and the turrets of their tanks, and the single pinprick eyes of the metal insects that swarmed about them.
He followed their progress from the hillside, along with everybody else. He didn’t know what had brought him out here. He had seen this tragedy played out once already, up close, but he couldn’t resist watching it again. He wondered if the sight might make him feel something.
The necrons fell upon Thelonius City and began to sack it. The hushed onlookers could see and hear little from this distance, just green flashes in the night sky and the occasional rumble or suggestion of a scream on the breeze, but their mind’s eyes were more than capable of completing the picture. They caught their breaths as the first tower crumbled, wreathing its proud fellows in dust and smoke.
Thelonius had been home to millions of people. Gunthar knew what they were going through, every one of them, but he couldn’t allow himself to care. A second tower fell, then he saw the first escapees, some in vehicles, many walking, being lowered by the external lifters as if there were somewhere to
go, somewhere they could be safe. Twenty minutes after that, the city’s lights went out for the final time.
Gunthar’s eyes were heavy, and he sat down on the grass to rest them.
In the aftermath of the Krieg withdrawal, the Planetary Defence Force had fallen apart. Most of the senior officers had left when they could, Colonel Braun among them, and many of the lower ranks had deserted. Gunthar had stayed. He was a soldier, after all, but a soldier now with no orders to follow.
Three more rescue ships had come, and there had been rumours of others sent to other ports. Every time one had landed, the trucks had returned with their quota of the privileged to fill those ships. They had run out of soldiers to guard them, so the would-be evacuees had had to arm themselves. The anger of the space port refugees at being left behind again had reached boiling point and, by the time of the final ship’s arrival, guns had no longer been sufficient to cow them.
Several of them had died in the attempt, but they had wrested the guns from their inexperienced wielders. They had commandeered the rescue ship, but it hadn’t been large enough to hold all of them, not nearly, so more fighting had broken out over which of them got to board it. The ship had departed, in the end, with a fraction of its passenger capacity, and left much wailing and howling behind it.
Gunthar had watched the fighting, but hadn’t joined either side. The hijackers had thought they could outrun death. They would soon learn their mistake, when the Imperial Navy caught up with them. There was no escape for them.
Colonel Braun’s replacement, an idealistic young major who had genuinely tried to pull everyone together for all of three days, should have been on that ship. Gunthar hadn’t seen him since then, but rumour had it he had put a gun to his own head, that his body lay at the foot of the hill with all the others.
Daylight streamed through Gunthar’s eyelids. He had drifted off to sleep, waking now to find his left cheek frozen to the ground. Dew had seeped into his tunic, and something small and hard was digging into his leg. The hillside was less packed than it had been, many of his fellow spectators having returned to their tents or to the relative warmth of the space port buildings. Plenty remained, however, to continue their silent vigil over Thelonius City although there was little new to see.
Digging into a hole in his trouser pocket, Gunthar found something in the lining. He extracted it carefully, almost didn’t recognise it. It had been so long since he had even thought about it. A gold ring, set with six amecyte stones. It was the colour of those stones, more than anything, that reminded him. Red was Arex’s favourite colour.
He ought to have thrown the ring away. It was worthless now. He returned it to his pocket instead. A connection to a life once lived and lost. A memento mori.
It was hard to believe how petty his concerns had been in that life, how different his goals and the future he had imagined for himself, but at least, he thought, he had had goals then. He recalled his drill instructors in the Death Korps of Krieg, and he knew what they would have said to him, how they would have diagnosed his problem. They would have told him he had lived too long.
His Death Korps comrades had abandoned him here, gone to find a new purpose to their lives elsewhere. It was time Gunthar did the same.
He had lived here once.
Hieronymous City. A field of rubble, now, most of it. Gunthar had marched through that field proudly on his way to war, trudged back through it in defeat, but he hadn’t really looked, hadn’t thought about what each of the mounds around him represented. He remembered now, the towers and the skyways, the emporiums and the eateries.
He remembered the people. So many, many people. The queues for the autocabs each morning, the throngs of administrators above and miners below. Sometimes, he had thought the skyways might collapse beneath the weight of them all.
When he looked, really looked, at the heaps of rubble, he could see those people, the remnants of their lives: strewn clothing, ornaments once cherished now shattered and forgotten, hololiths in cracked frames. Worst of all, he could make out a foot here, a grey hand there, protruding forlornly. This place was a graveyard.
He saw a scrap of scarlet and purple, and scrabbled to uncover a PDF trooper’s corpse. The boy had fallen foul of a necron ghoul, probably during the first wave of attacks to judge by his state of decomposition. The ghoul must have been distracted, though, as there was still some flesh on the trooper’s bones. Much good it had done him. He must have lain undiscovered for weeks until the Death Korps’ guns had collapsed the skyway beneath him and given him a semblance of a burial.
Gunthar took his lasgun and the cleaning agents for it. He began to strip down the weapon, but saw it was burnt out, useless. He kept it anyway. It could still deter a mutant or a cultist from attacking him, if indeed there were any survivors of either breed. He searched the trooper’s backpack for grenades, or anything else he could use, found only a mangled but serviceable luminator.
The sun was going down as Gunthar reached the cleared area in which an army had once assembled. He paused here and tried to see past that fresh, stark memory, to recall what this place had been before then. He couldn’t have been too far from home. His old home, that was. He scanned the few remaining towers ahead of him, searching for a reference point, but saw nothing he could recognise.
He needed to get closer, climb higher. He followed the Death Korps’ route into the heart of the city, and soon found buildings rising around him, skyways running over his head, neither as ubiquitous as they had been but still providing some small measure of familiarity. He looked for a staircase and began to make his way upwards. He counted the floors carefully, and emerged on 204. He nearly stepped into an abyss, had to grab
on to the door and haul himself back over the threshold.
The 204th-floor skyway was gone. There was nothing left of it. What the necrons had begun, the Death Korps of Krieg had finished – and to judge by the broken windows, the graffitied walls and the burnt-out habs Gunthar could see across the gulf, his own people had been only too eager to abet them.
He stared at the defaced image of the Imperial aquila, displayed over the doorway of what looked like it had been a records office. Had he passed that building on his journey to work each day? He couldn’t be sure. He retreated into the tower, found a room to sleep in. It looked like his old room, the same layout, but pretend as he might he knew better than to trust the illusion. He tried to fill a cup with cold water, but all that came out of the tap was a trickle of brown sludge. He drank this anyway.
He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew he hadn’t found it yet.
He almost reached the eatery. The exclusive one, the one for which he had purchased the ring. It was on an adjacent skyway, so close, but he could see no way across to it.
The night had drawn in, a sullen half-moon only intermittently visible through drifting clouds, so Gunthar was finding his way by luminator light. He shone his beam towards the eatery window; saw only debris stacked up behind it. The internal walls had collapsed. Even if he could have made it to the door, he couldn’t have got inside, and why would he, he thought? Those doors had always been closed to the likes of him before. He would recover few memories from in there.
He could use the position of the eatery, however, to orient himself. He knew how many floors to drop now, how many more blocks to walk, before he came to the statue. It had been vandalised, of course, cut off at the knees, buts its feet were still plascreted to its layered plinth and Gunthar could sit on that plinth in the same spot he had sat before. He did so, tentatively, closed his eyes and tried to imagine that nothing had changed since then, that the body of the statue still rose behind him, that the offices around this public square were intact and only shuttered for the night.
