by John French
The defenders’ own signals, carried on buried cables beneath the cities and under mountains, went unheard by the invaders. A few amongst the leaders of the scattered shelters spoke of waiting, of surviving beneath the earth in silence. The survivors were alone, they argued. They had no way of calling for help, even if there was help that could come to them. Better to be still, to hope that the enemy would pass on and leave the dead world they had made. But more were the voices that said that the invaders must bleed no matter the cost.
Three
Contamination
Sides
Guilt
The klaxons stopped screaming. A second later, the light in the decontamination chamber turned a cold blue.
Like water under the sun, thought Akil.
‘Come on,’ he said to Rashne, forgetting that the boy could not hear him. The scout machine was powered down, the internal and external vox dead. He moved to where Rashne sat and tapped him on the arm. Rashne’s head came up slowly, and Akil noticed that the eyes behind the lenses took a moment to focus. Akil raised a thumb, and pointed to the machine’s rear hatch. Rashne turned his head to look, and then scrambled towards it. Akil followed, reaching for the release handle.
He paused, waiting for the double siren blare that would mean it was safe to unseal the tank. Rashne started slapping the metal of the hatch and rocking backwards and forwards.
The signal sounded and Akil pulled the handle. The hatch hissed as it opened and blue light spilled in. Rashne pushed the door wide and shot out, trailing his air bottle behind him on its rubber tube. Akil stepped out.
The chamber beyond was a vast cylinder, its walls ribbed with concentric metal rings wide enough to encircle three tanks abreast. Nozzles studded the walls, still dripping cleansing fluid. Metal grates covered a void that extended beneath the floor, and behind them great blast doors shut out the world above. In front, more blast doors waited.
On either side of the scout vehicle, the crews of Lantern and Silence pulled themselves out of their machines. Lantern’s left sponson was a twisted mess of metal, its gun ripped away, the empty gunner’s alcove exposed.
Someone died there, Akil realised. He stared for a moment, then looked away quickly.
Thick, colourless liquid dripped from the tracks and hulls of the three tanks. High-pressure hoses and rad-beams had washed over them, stripping everything toxic from their hulls and killing anything organic. The tanks were now clean enough that the crews could come out from their sealed guts, but there was still a risk; the tanks would need another decontamination cycle before they could be allowed back into the shelter itself. The crews would leave the chamber, and the rotating ring-collars would blast the tanks again, this time with a stronger dose of rad and chem. Nothing could survive that.
At least, that was the theory. This was the first of the doors back into the underworld from the hell above, but it was not the last. They had to pass through another set before they could remove their suits. Then they would be treated to the same decontamination process as the machines. After that they could be declared fit to breathe the same air as the rest of the shelter complex.
Akil began to move towards the small accessway to the side of the blast doors.
The cry of alarm was muffled, but he still heard it. He turned. Beside him the crews of the other two tanks had gone very still. Rashne was on the ground, his hand around the back of his head. For a second he thought the boy was having a seizure. Then he saw what whoever had cried out had seen.
Rashne was not having a seizure – he was pulling the hood of his enviro-suit off.
Akil had taken two steps towards the boy when the rubber collar came loose. He went still. Rashne knelt on the floor, gasping as he breathed the free air once more. His thatch-blond hair was matted and sweat beaded his forehead.
Akil watched, his own breath still in his mouth as Rashne sucked down great lungfuls. The boy looked up, his eyes blue and bright. He smiled, and took another breath. Nothing happened. Rashne began to stand unsteadily.
Sirens howled. Red lights flashed, staining the wet vehicles crimson. Rashne yelped and half fell, his hand flying out to the hull of the scout vehicle to catch himself. Akil stepped forward, reaching to grab the boy, but Rashne pushed himself back up. His gloved hand came away from the surface of the machine. Akil could see the sheen of moisture on the fingers. The boy was not looking at him – Rashne brought his hand up and wiped the sweat from his eyes. It was a gesture as unconscious as the beating of a heart.
Akil’s hand closed on Rashne’s arm. The boy turned to look at him. Rashne’s mouth opened.
Blood poured from his eyes. Pustules bloomed across his face, burst and grew, eating into his flesh in widening craters. Dark tendrils spread across his skin as blood clotted to black slime. Akil felt the boy’s arm go soft under his grip. His hand opened and Rashne fell to the ground like a bag of offal.
Akil felt himself fall, and the vomit rise in his throat. The sensation was oddly distant, as if he was observing it in someone else, as if his mind had retreated to a place where the present no longer belonged to him. He heard himself trying to scream. He saw himself hit the ground, and felt arms wrap around him and drag him across the floor towards the small door in the side of the chamber.
Behind him, the dissolving body of Rashne lay in the pulsing red light.
‘This might go better if you give us the room,’ said Brel to the rest of them. Jallinika and Calsuriz were already standing, their muscles tense as though they were about to snap. ‘That means you all get out,’ he clarified.
He brought his hands up to rub his eyes as the bunk room emptied around him. He waited until the sounds of scraping boots and muttering faded, and the door clicked shut. He looked up.
Tahirah stood, her eyes bright and hard, arms loose by her sides as if she was keeping them deliberately under control. Fury radiated off her. Brel looked away and let out a long breath. He had only been out of decontamination for an hour and he could already feel the pain soaking into his head again. His tongue and saliva tasted of tin, and the buzz of the lumen strips in the cramped bunk room made him want to close his eyes. He wanted very much to not have to talk, to just be able to sit quietly and listen to his crew bicker around him. He did not want this.
‘Lieutenant,’ he said carefully.
‘Stand up,’ she said quietly, and Brel heard the tremble of anger in her voice. He stood, blowing out another breath.
‘Salute,’ she said. He saluted, carefully, without show. ‘Again,’ she said. He saluted again. She took a step forward. Brel knew it was coming.
I should just ride it, he thought. Take the licks and move on, roll with the current and feed off the bottom.
Tahirah took a breath.
‘If you ever–’
‘I don’t care,’ he said in a blank voice.
He looked up. Tahirah had frozen, her mouth open as if he had punched her in the gut and she couldn’t breathe. He watched the shock and rage flow across her face.
‘I–’ she began again.
‘I don’t care what you are going to say about what I did out there. I don’t care that you are my squadron’s commanding officer – I don’t care about what happened. I’m sorry that you do, but you will have to settle for that.’
He turned and sat back down on the edge of his bunk. Tahirah looked as if she was trying to climb back up the mountain of her anger. Brel sighed.
‘Trust me, I can understand. One machine, one gunner and one kid too stretched out inside to keep his hood on in primary decontamination. That’s quite a load for someone to take, and so I understand that in your head coming to chew me out was about the only thing that you feel you can control.’ He paused and nodded, half to himself and half to her. ‘But I don’t care. My crew doesn’t care, and if you want the truth, no one else cares. All they care about is if they are going to come out o
f this alive or not.’
Tahirah’s jaw was working, as though she was struggling to form what she wanted to say. Her skin had gone very white, the blood drained away. Her pupils were black pinpricks.
Her hands are shaking too, thought Brel. She must be half my age and here she is probably a twitch away from hitting me. He shook his head, and reached under the bunk. Tahirah tensed on the edge of his sight. He brought the bottle out slowly, shook it once so that the clear liquid within sloshed against the glass.
‘Truth,’ he said, producing a pair of tin cups and pouring a measure into each. He held one out to Tahirah. ‘It always tastes bitter.’
Tahirah took the cup but did not drink. Brel took a swig from his own, and felt the liquor roll like fire down his throat. Tahirah looked at her cup for a long moment, and then raised it to her mouth. A second later her eyes began to water and she tried to suppress a cough. Brel almost laughed.
Tahirah snorted, and stepped back to sit on a pressed metal chair.
‘I read your records,’ she said, and took another sip. Brel raised an eyebrow.
‘They actually still have records here? Thought they would have lost them by now.’
‘Medical mainly, but there was a service list attached.’
Brel rolled his cup between his hands and avoided her eye.
‘By my reckoning this would be what, your twelfth war?’
‘Thirteenth, actually,’ Brel replied, still not looking at her. ‘They didn’t count the Halo Margins. No one likes to remember a farce followed by a defeat. Not in the Great Crusade.’ The grafted skin around the back of his head and down his arms was starting to itch again; it always did when he thought about the past. ‘Because it’s not your own,’ Fastinex had joked when Brel had told the loader about his flesh grafts itching. His mouth twitched for a second. Twenty years since that fat bastard caught a ricochet, he thought, and still his dumb face makes me smile.
‘I found a list of decorations and citations too. Even a couple of recommendations for promotion. Then you wind up here, and… nothing. Not even a record of reprimand.’
‘Forgotten, that’s what we are. You must have noticed.’
‘Not any more,’ she said. Brel remained silent. ‘They are raising more units. Command has put the order out – every piece of machinery is going to be armed, and every person that can breathe recycled air is going to fight. Not just volunteers, anyone who is fit enough to ride a machine is going to be trained. They want us to strike back.’
Brel laughed before he could stop himself.
‘Is that funny?’ Tahirah asked.
‘Yes,’ nodded Brel. ‘In a way, it is the most hilarious thing I have heard in years.’ He put the cup down and poured another thick measure into the bottom. ‘No one cared about this place, not even when the rest of the Imperium started busting itself apart. Now one side has decided to reduce it to slime, and we are putting men and women in war machines who will die in seconds.’ He smiled. ‘Yeah, funny.’
‘It’s their home.’
‘Was their home. I doubt they would want to live there now.’ He took another gulp and rolled his neck to release the tension in his muscles. He looked up at Tahirah, his face an impassive mask to her glassy-eyed anger.
‘You cold bastard.’
‘Tastes bitter, like I said.’
‘We need to fight with everything we have. The traitors–’
‘What?’ he said, and grinned again without humour. ‘You think that the higher-ups here on Tallarn are pulling together because they believe in one ideology over the other? All they care is that the one side is trying to kill us and the other is not. Which side are we on, anyway?’
Tahirah stood. The quivering anger was back. She drew the laspistol slightly clumsily, but he noticed that the barrel did not shake as she levelled it at his face.
‘That’s sedition,’ she said quietly.
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘One more tank commander gone and the enemy didn’t even need to fire a shot. Maybe they will give you a medal.’
He brought his cup slowly to his mouth, took a sip and looked back up into the barrel of her gun. After a second she let the pistol drop to her side. Brel nodded his thanks.
‘I am going to do you a favour now, for free, because it is still early enough for you. Stop thinking of us as people. Me, my crew, that hawk-eyed civilian, or any of the rest that get hooked up to you. They are the machines they ride, and they do it well or they do it badly. That is all you care about, because that is all that matters to getting through this.’
Slowly and carefully, Tahirah put her cup down on the empty chair and took a step towards the door. Brel let out a long tired breath, but Tahirah spun faster than he could react and punched him hard across the jaw. Very hard.
He fell to the floor, his head buzzing. Lying there, he heard Tahirah pick up the half-empty bottle and walk away. He was tempted to laugh, but the door had already shut behind her.
Akil sat on the floor, alone and silent, his eyes staring at water dripping down the plascrete wall. For a second he wondered if the water had seeped in from outside the bunker, then he laughed at his own thought.
If it was from outside I would be dead already, he thought, and remembered the rotting pits opening in Rashne’s face.
He shifted his legs up so that they were huddled against his chest. The overalls they had given him felt rough and stiff against his skin. His own clothes had been burned once he was past the first stage of decontamination. He was not sure why, but he could see the fear in the soldiers’ eyes, and so he had stripped off another layer of his life and seen it dumped into a furnace without question.
Adrenaline had drained from him once he was inside the shelter. It had been like the tide receding after a storm to reveal the wreckage of its passing. People walked by, all in uniforms, all moving with apparent purpose. Some looked at him, but he was careful not to meet their gaze. He did not want to talk to anyone. He did not want to see himself in their eyes. He had walked down long grey corridors without knowing where he was going, until he just stopped. In the end he had just sat down with his back against the wall and waited for something to make sense. He was fairly sure that that had been several hours ago. He blinked and shook his head. He felt tired and empty.
There is nothing left to me that is not buried or hidden. My world lives on only in sealed graves now. He cupped his hands, staring at the lines of his palms. What am I doing? I am no warrior. I never was, and what is there to fight for now anyway? Clustered in the deep chambers, he had heard the other refugees talk of striking back, and striking back until the enemy poured blood into the dead soil of Tallarn.
Tallarn. Every time he thought or heard the word he felt the guilt rise from the pit of his thoughts. The dead skulls of buildings, and the look on Rashne’s face in the instant before his eyes dissolved, blossomed once again in his mind’s eye.
‘Thinking too hard can kill you, you know,’ said a voice from above him.
He looked up. A woman with a sharp face, cropped dark hair and baggy fatigues was looking down at him. She smiled, and Akil saw the tiredness in the gesture.
‘Lieutenant,’ he said, and started to get to his feet. She waved him back and dropped down next to him. He had not met her before joining the squadron, and had spoken all of ten words to her before they had gone up to the world above.
‘Tahirah, please,’ she said, and he smelled the alcohol on her breath. She reached into a thigh pouch and pulled out a bottle. Clear liquid sloshed in the bottom. She opened it and took a swig, then offered the bottle to him. ‘But Tah will do.’
He looked up at her, then at the bottle. Tahirah gave a small shrug. He took it from her.
The alcohol was surprisingly smooth in his mouth, but he coughed when it hit his throat. Tahirah laughed.
‘Thanks,’ said Akil, as numb warmth spread th
rough him.
‘Yeah, that stuff is pretty to the point.’
He spread the fingers of his left hand, his eyes tracing the folds and lines of the skin. He took another swig. This time he felt his throat numb at the alcohol’s touch, and did not cough.
‘I am sorry,’ he said.
‘For getting lost?’ she asked. She held out a hand for the bottle and he handed it back. ‘Yeah, that was pretty stupid, but you drive a machine well enough, and you seem like you don’t make a habit of stupidity. So…’ She trailed away, and he saw that her eyes were unfocused, as if she were looking at a memory. Then she shook her head and frowned. ‘Not your fault really. We lost you as much as you got lost.’ She took a gulp from the bottle. ‘Did you see them?’
‘Who? The enemy?’
Tahirah nodded.
‘No, I just saw the… machines. But your gunner, Lachlan, he said he saw them.’ He paused and glanced at Tahirah. ‘He said they were Space Marines.’
‘Iron Warriors,’ she said with a nod. ‘And a lot of them. That is what command are saying. The soup above is singing with their signals.’
Akil frowned. He had heard of the Legiones Astartes, of course. He had even seen one of their number at a distance once, when he was a boy. His father had been invited to a ceremony to mark the outset of some campaign – or the successful completion of one, Akil had never been sure. All the other great merchant princes had been there. The air had glittered with gold, and coiled with scent, and the Space Marine had stood beside the Governor-Militant like a dusk leopard amongst butterflies.
Iron Warriors. He had only dimly known the name before, and now it was the name of the slayers of his world.
‘They can die, just like us,’ said Akil, hearing the edge in his own voice.
Tahirah glanced at him, and raised an eyebrow. He took another swig from the bottle but did not speak. She shrugged.
