by Henry Zou
The shattering windows gave them the signal to move. Roth rushed from his hiding place in a drainage ditch adjacent to the tenement’s communal courtyard. The remains of his team followed close behind.
Scurrying low, hugging the walls of the building, they spotted the vehicles of the murder squad parked outside the front of the tenement. Roth ran towards an armoured truck, convinced he would be downed by an unseen shot before he reached it. No shots came and he hurled himself into the open door of the vehicle. Once inside, he turned and pulled Celeminé into the cab after him. In the rear-view mirror, he saw Captain Pradal and the two resistance fighters clamber onto the flat-bed.
The belly of the truck stank of machine grease and ammonia. He was glad it was too dark to see in detail. Reaching down underneath the heat-warped dashboard he fumbled for the keys. They were still warm in the ignition. He cranked it and nursed the truck to life like a winter-waked bear. Two spears of white light stabbed from the headlamps, pale and incandescent.
The truck began to roll, heavy and sluggish at first. Roth edged the vehicle forward, pressuring the accelerator. In the side mirror, Roth spotted an Ironclad stumble from the tenement entrance, dazed, wounded and brandishing his lasgun wildly. Captain Pradal put him down with a well-aimed shot. He then shot out the over-sized wheels of two stationary FPV Prowlers in quick succession.
‘Go sir, now now now!’ Pradal shouted. He slapped the back of the cab frantically.
Finally roused from its gear-seizing sleep the truck found its rhythm and surged away, trailing a cone of exhaust. The cracked speedometer clocked a high seventy, leaving the tenement quarters far behind.
Lord Marshal Khmer was brooding in the depths of his armchair when an adjutant announced the arrival of the Orphratean emissary.
The silk screen panels of his stateroom door slid smoothly open on intricate cog rollers. Aspet Fure walked into the chamber, bowing respectfully at the threshold of the entrance. Like the others of his clan, Fure had the bronze skin and pale olive-green eyes that marked him as Purebred, a product of human eugenics. The bodyglove of snakeskin sepia did little to hide the hard muscular lines of his limbs. He was evidently a fighting man, and even though he had shed his wargear out of etiquette, a Lugos Hi-Power autopistol was holstered at his hip.
Khmer was not impressed. He did not even bother to rise out of his chair. To him, they were little more than uncultured freelancers. Indeed, the lineage of the company could be traced back to the barbarian soldiers of the Ophratean sub-arctic, during the lost times of pre-Unification. These were the very same savages who had worshipped sky pythons and raised pillars from the painted jawbones of their enemies only ten thousand years ago. Now the entire economy of Orphrates relied on the capital inflows of its famed mercenaries.
‘Salutations, lord marshal. You seem morose, so I will keep this brief and civil,’ began the Aspet.
The lord marshal raised an eyebrow. Obviously the barbarians had chosen an emissary who could string together sentences without growling between words, he mused.
‘I’m listening,’ said Khmer.
‘An attack was orchestrated for the priority targets on Buraghand, Cantica, eighty hours ago. Your informant from within the target group was able to contact my company with ample intelligence. Unfortunately, the attack met with limited success. The priority target still lives–’
‘Shut your mouth!’ roared the lord marshal. He had sprung up from his chair, veins of anger popping livid against his neck. He stomped over to a dresser of chocolate satinwood. It was a masterpiece carved by the late Toussaint Pilon in the early Revivalist style. The furniture was inlaid with a veneer of pearl; the iridescent patterns resembled cherubs at play when viewed from a distance. Khmer put his boot straight through the lower cabinet.
‘Do you know what this means? Your incompetence, the incompetence of your men may cost me everything! Do you know what we are dealing with here? We are dealing with the damned Inquisition. There was no room for error!’
‘Which reminds me, lord marshal. You did not inform us prior to contract that the initial bait-target was a sworn member of the Inquisition. Such a high-risk killing brokers an eight hundred per cent increase on the initial amount.’
Khmer almost drooled with fury. ‘I hired you idiots expecting full competency. Now you expect me to deal with this garbage?’
The Orphratean shrugged. ‘We don’t ask questions. We fought, we bled and we expect full payment. That’s the way it works, lord marshal.’
‘Not this time. You think I needed you to tell me of your failures? I already knew. I’ve known for some time that your men fouled up.’
The Orphratean was slightly taken aback. For once, confusion creased his noble features. ‘Then why the facade? Why did you request a brief if you knew the answer?’
A cold slivered sneer crept up the corners of Khmer’s mouth. ‘Because I wanted you here when I told you the news of my own. I wanted you here so I could savour your reaction.’
The Orphratean took a step back. His fingertips rested lightly on his holstered pistol. Behind him the screen door rolled open and a full squad of provosts greeted him with a wall of shotguns and shock mauls.
The lord marshal cleared his throat theatrically for all to hear. ‘I want to tell you, Aspet Fure, that twelve hours ago CantiCol garrison forces stationed on Orphrates raided your company holdings. They have broken your network, and what little remains of your enterprise have scattered into hiding. Your crimes, which include collusion with the Archenemy and murder of an Inquisitorial authority, have given me the right to terminate dealings with the Purebred across the subsector and process punishment accordingly.’
The Orphratean mercenary shook his head in mute disbelief.
‘I’m sorry it had to be this way. But silence is a heavy price worth paying,’ said Khmer as he turned his back on the Purebred.
Chapter Nine
The last battalion of the 26th Colonial Artillery had been fighting for the past thirty-one days. Since the Atrocities, twelve hundred men of the 26th had fought for the cave temples twenty kilometres west of Buraghand city.
They had held, even as the meat-grinding advance of Ironclad mechanised columns had crushed ninety per cent of CantiCol forces. Every day the Archenemy had assaulted that pale, coarse-grained intrusion of igneous tusk over three hundred metres in height. Every day the warren of caves within the batholith had repelled them with guns and artillery.
Strategically, the low-lying scrubland provided limited enemy cover. Erosion had weathered the surrounding ruins and trace fossils into sculptural rock. Bulbous succulents and taproot knotted in the gaps of man-made geoforms. Ever since the Guard had been stationed at the cave temples they had coined it the ‘Barbican’. The three thousand Archenemy dead that littered the dry prairie attested to that.
Spitting up great plumes of smoke, sixty-pounders had bombarded the Archenemy positions, harassing them and taunting them into suicidal charges. The great guns vibrated the caverns with their recoil, lobbing shells beyond the Erbus canal five kilometres out.
Although sustained enemy assaults had inflicted five hundred and ninety-two casualties, the battalion kept fighting. The 26th fought on almost in spite of the fact that they had nothing left to defend. Before the conquest, they had been tasked with defending the only motorway that connected Buraghand to the western outlands, but that didn’t matter any more.
It was during the early hours of the thirty-first day that Inquisitor Obodiah Roth and his retinue sought refuge within the Barbican. Their captured truck had been left beyond the perimeter defences of the cave temples. By virtue of superstition the vehicle had been set ablaze beyond the razor wire.
Lurching up the escarpment, the inquisitor and his men looked bloodied, ragged and delirious with fatigue. They stumbled towards the nearest cave bunker, an outlying sentry post that could fit no more than three or fou
r men.
It was camouflaged with prairie grass and fortified by a breastwork of mud and basket-woven sticks. From the cave, Troopers Prasad and Buakaw rushed out to meet them. At the sight of the Guardsmen, in the brown jackets and rank sashes of the CantiCol, the inquisitor fumbled out his rosette. Exhaustion tarred the words in his mouth. Instead he cast the rosette onto the ash before him, as he collapsed onto one knee.
Roth did not know how long he had been sleeping for. He could not even remember falling asleep. When he awoke, the high-noon suns filled his vision, flaring from the cave mouth in a prickling wash of white light.
He found himself in a small cave, asleep over a bed of packing crates. The cuirass of his Spathaen fighting-plate had been shed like a metal husk on the ground. He was still armoured from the hip down, but on top he had been stripped down to a loose cotton shirt that was stiff with sweat mineral. Somehow he still holstered his plasma pistol in its shoulder rig.
Squinting against the light, Roth eased himself up. He winced as his stiff limbs stung with lactic build-up. A cursory inspection yielded bruised ribs, minor lacerations and stress fractures in his lower legs. Given his circumstances, Roth considered himself extremely fortunate.
He took stock of his surroundings, realising he was in a hand-carved cave with a smoothed floor and low ceiling. Dimly, he remembered he was in some sort of cave temple complex, a place of pilgrimage before the war. Small shrines and votive offerings to the God-Emperor cluttered one side of the grotto – crude clay aquilas, painted candles, beads, scriptures on parchment strips feathering the walls.
Shuffling over to the cave mouth he peered down at the Barbican, which sprawled out beneath him. It was a shelved cliffside of grey and ivory stone, smeared with banks of thorn-bush, reed and toothy stumps of cactus. The slope was broken by almost vertical cliffs in some places – rocky, bare, precipitous and irregular. At its plateau, batteries of field artillery bristled like a roc’s nest, heavy Earthshaker barrels saluting the horizon.
‘Sleep well, inquisitor?’ asked Captain Pradal. Roth turned to see the man emerge from a stooped tunnel at the rear of the cave. The officer had shaved and scrubbed most of the bloodied filth from his face. His head was bandaged and so was his left wrist.
‘Like a beaten-up child,’ said Roth, rubbing his face with his hands. Flakes of dried blood and filth dislodged into his palms.
‘Welcome, inquisitor. It’s about time we had some conscious activity out of you.’ A second man had appeared beside Pradal. His rank sash denoted him as colonel, but he was young for a man of such rank. Thick-necked, square-jawed and shaven-headed, the officer looked more like gang muscle than a colonel of the artillery. When he spoke his voice was sandy and coarse, whether from chain-smoking tabac or gun-smoke inhalation, Roth could not tell. Both suited his rough-edged demeanour.
‘My thanks, colonel–’
‘Colonel Gamburyan, battalion commander of the 26th,’ he said.
They briefly shook hands. The colonel’s grip was hard and callused, from years of gripping awkward shells and pulling artillery pieces. It made Roth ashamed of his own well-manicured hands.
‘Captain Pradal here has given me a full briefing of your situation. I wouldn’t have a frag’s clue how we can help, but if there’s anything you need, I can try my hardest to accommodate,’ rasped the colonel as he drew a stick of tabac from behind his ear and lit it in one deft, well-practiced movement.
In truth Roth could have done with some sustenance, or even some water and a rag to scour the solid filth that caked his body, but he had his priorities.
‘I need a cipher machine, a cryptographer. Military-grade will do, you must have one somewhere.’
The colonel savoured a mouthful of smoke and nodded. ‘I thought you would. The other inquisitor, Sella-meanie I think her name is. She said you might need one. I’ve got it set up in the main command bunker.’
‘Excellent. You are quite on the ball, colonel,’ said Roth as he struggled to his feet.
‘Have to be. We’re alive aren’t we?’ He shrugged with a grin, tabac stick clenched between his teeth. ‘Anything else I can do for you?’
Roth sighed wearily. ‘Yes, colonel. May I be so frank as to ask for a smoke?’
When Roth had requested a military-grade cryptographer, he had forgotten that military-grade often stood for obsolete, un-serviced and possibly broken.
The cipher machine was a heavy-duty cogitator set up in the sand-bagged belly of the Barbican. Its porcelain casing was furred with dust, the spindles and keystrokes cracked and faded. Several hundred rusty cables spooled out from underneath its skirting like the tentacles of an undersea leviathan. Roth had never in all his years of service seen a cogitator like it.
With neither patience nor an inclination for technology, Roth left most of the work to Celeminé. She was a natural, tapping on the loom pedals as she adjusted the bristle of cogs and dials. The machine purred, and a flower of ivory set above the mantle of the machine began to gyrate, signalling the decoder’s activation. Roth tried to busy himself with the cables, trying to look useful.
‘The sooner you stop fussing over my shoulder, the sooner we can begin the decoding,’ admonished Celeminé.
Roth mumbled an apology and sat himself down on a bench improvised from plywood and ammunition trunks, content to watch. Celeminé plugged Delahunt’s signet into the cipher’s central feed, winking data pulses into the machine’s logic engines. Her other hand began to spool paper out from the mouth of a porcelain cherub’s face set into the machine’s side casing.
‘Is it done?’ asked Roth, craning for a look from his seat.
‘No. This signet is magenta-level encryption and this decoder is garbage-level decryption. Its logic engines have to penetrate the data’s enigma coding and polyalphabetic substitution. You can figure out the rest.’
Roth stared at her blankly. Celeminé stood, one hand on her hip, her suede boots tapping in reprove. She had changed out of her bodyglove and procured a cotton shirt and some baggy CantiCol breeches. The trousers fit her so loosely that she had to double them over and cinch them tight around her tiny waist with a silk scarf. Likewise, the shirt was so voluminous that she knotted the hem up above her midriff. Roth thought she looked like some sort of hive dancer. She rolled her eyes at him.
‘It means this might take a while.’
‘That’s quite all right. We can wait,’ said Roth.
As if to prove him wrong, the cave bunker suddenly shook with a low tremor. Grit loosened from the rafters in a dusty downpour. Roth felt the percussive heave in the depths of his diaphragm.
‘Are we under attack?’ Celeminé said. Her playful demeanour vanished in an instant. Her chest webbing, sloughed off and hung on the rafters overhead, was snatched down.
‘I don’t think that’s incoming artillery,’ answered Roth. The cavern shook again, jarring the sand-bagged walls.
‘What is it then?’
‘Outgoing, of course. The Guard are firing on targets.’ His reply was punctuated by a rhythmic trio of blasts, the decibels echoed by the acoustic warren of the cave temples.
Soon enough, Cantican officers began clattering into the command bunker. The bank of vox arrays that encompassed an entire wall of the cave began to hiss and chatter with multiple open stations. The sound of distant gunfire and commands, washed with static began to grate out of the speakers.
Roth snagged a passing captain by the sleeve as he ran by. ‘What’s the situation?’ Roth asked.
The captain looked at Roth like he had been just asked a rhetorical question. ‘Uh… well we’re fighting, of course. Again. Ironclad infantry offensive, crossing the Erbus canal and making another break across no-man’s-land.’
‘Does this happen often?’
‘Every damn day,’ came the reply.
Captain Pradal sighted the Archenemy first. He had vo
lunteered for sentry in one of the forward observation caves overlooking the northern approach when he saw them – Archenemy foot scouts silently scouring up the steep scree slope no more than two hundred metres away.
Through his magnoculars, he saw them skulking low against the tumbled wedges of igneous rock, slowly rustling through the crops of mountainous flora. They made good use of the sparse cover, crawling on the loose gravel and hugging the dry, stunted vegetation. At first he counted no more than ten, but then he saw twenty, fifty, perhaps more. A full company advancing in open file.
Pradal turned to the two Guardsmen in the gunpit alongside, handing one of them his magnoculars as he reached for the vox-set. There was no need. The Archenemy fired first. A flak rocket, most likely from a shoulder launcher, screamed overhead, trailing a ragged spine of smoke. It spiralled wildly before exploding forty metres uphill in a scatter of rock fragments.
And just like that, the Archenemy announced their presence. With a bestial roar that swelled in volume, the Ironclad surged to their feet and charged. All told, Pradal counted four, maybe five, full infantry companies, most emerging from cover. They thundered up the slope in a staggered line, closing the two hundred metre distance fast. But beyond the infantry screen, kicking up a curtain of dust, mechanised columns rolled across the Erbus canal in support. It was the fighting vehicles that terrified Pradal most of all.
All at once, the three perimeter positions, two cave bunkers and a concrete pillbox opened fire. Captain Pradal had bellied down behind the gunpit’s lone heavy bolter. The forty kilogram gun bucked like an industrial drill, even when Pradal threw his weight behind it. Fat nosed bolt shells slammed out of the barrel.
‘Command one! This is forward observation eight. Enemy infantry advancing at north bank!’ barked Private Chamdri into the vox-set. He was hunkered down next to Pradal, one hand over his kepi hat as he screamed into the mouthpiece.
