Sabbat Worlds Anthology

CELL (Nik Vincent)

It wasn’t safe to pray anywhere on Reredos.

The room was dark and cramped, and the floor beneath Ayatani Perdu’s feet was earthy and sodden, and smelt of things he preferred not to think about. His boots leaked, and his feet were trying hard to shrink from the organic dankness that penetrated through the old hide. He was trying almost too hard to concentrate on the prayer, to imbue his voice with the conviction that he did not always feel, but his discomfort was getting the better of him.

Perdu’s congregation never seemed to grow or diminish. There was room for half a dozen, and half a dozen always showed up for his services. The faces varied, depending on who was sent to do what jobs, and on who lived and who died. War changed things, and when the war was over and the occupation established, that changed things too. The resisters were the most devout and the biggest risk-takers; they needed priests, and they needed safe places where they could exchange information or pool resources. The two coincided here.

He was surrounded by men, taller and thinner than dusk shadows. They stank too. They had come off the agri-galleries, tired and hungry, but at least they didn’t have to worry about their feet. He did not envy the aching in their bones from arching their backs and stooping their shoulders to fit into the rooms that he could stand erect in, but he did envy their prosthetics, their elongated, telescopic shins and tapered spade-like feet that meant they were never ankle-deep in anything.

‘The Emperor protects,’ he said. He wondered if he believed it.

‘The Emperor protects.’

The words were barely out of his mouth the second time when Perdu heard the wet thud of someone going down. The man had been standing behind Perdu. He didn’t know his name. There were no names any more, nor conversations, nor even rumours. Three years was a long time to learn that lesson, but now, no one talked, no one shared, no one speculated. The work that was done was done quietly. His work was done only in these places, these rooms that were assigned to him, with these people, who came to him for strength and solace, who came to him because they believed, against all reason, that the Emperor would protect.

He was an agent of the God-Emperor and of the beloved Beati, and he was an enabler of the resistance movement on Reredos.

He dropped the prayer book and turned, in time to see the foetid air swirl around the collapsed figure. He bent over the body, his prayer book banging against his chest as it hung from the chain around his neck. It swung out, almost catching the dying man on his brow. He rasped a breath and reached up a hand. Perdu placed the book in the agri-worker’s hands, and reached out his own clean palm to crack the man’s chest filter.

Perdu had to bang hard on the filter, twice, before he could twist it and draw it out of the man’s chest. It was caked with a gritty purple mass of spores mixed with the mucus that the agri-workers now produced in such vast quantities that ceramite tar-buckets were used as spittoons in the drinking holes that surrounded the galleries where the men lived and worked. Perdu had seen what this crap could do to rockcrete floors, pitting and scarring, and eating away at all but the most impenetrable materials.

The congregation dispersed as Perdu tried to save one man in a world that was being eaten away and gobbed out in mucus chunks by relentless occupation forces.

The ayatani priest pushed two fingers into the hole in the man’s chest, like a kid with a jar of ploin-kernel butter, turning them around the circumference of the filter and digging out the unholy shit that had taken the victim’s breath away.

How many times had he done it before? Dozens, certainly, scores, maybe even hundreds. And how many men had he saved?

There was too much of it. Why hadn’t this damned pute cleaned his filter? He must have left it for days. Did he have some sort of death wish?

Perdu eased the man flat onto his back. He hated laying him on the cold wet filth, but had no choice. He straddled the body, placing one knee on either side of the filter, and pushed his fingers back into the cavity. The pressure of his knees pushed more of the filth out onto his fingers, and he scooped it up and flicked it out onto the floor before going back for more. The body seemed to be breathing, but it was the action of Perdu pumping his legs against the chest that was causing the rasping gulps that he could hear only too clearly in the corpse’s throat. He was a corpse. His face was grey and his lips blue. His eyes stared blankly out of his head, bulging slightly as though he’d been strangled. This creeping asphyxia was worse than being throttled; it was worse than anything.

‘The Lady’s...’ Perdu began as he pushed his knees once more into the corpse’s chest. He felt a rib give way, and took off the tension, dropping his knees onto the cold dank floor to either side of the body, horrified by his attempts to resurrect the man.

He drew the back of his hand across his forehead, and dropped his head down onto his chest.

He could feel the gritty mucus spreading beneath the knees of his trousers, and started to rise to his feet. There was nothing more for him to do. His congregation had left him; he was alone. Time stood still as he hovered over the body for several more minutes. His eyes shifted to the floor, to the oil-slick of purple sputum that was spreading and leaching into the ground around the corpse, around where his knees had been, bubbling, and corroding the trampled surface. The fabric of his trousers was smouldering slightly, and he tore away the ragged scraps, knowing that there was no mending the cloth.

He noticed edges in the purple mess, hard lines that shouldn’t have been there. Tentatively, he ran his fingers through the spreading mucus and began to retrieve tiny tablets of ceramite, chips that had been shaved away from Emperor-only-knew what. They were small and irregular in shape; they had been improvised.

Perdu had not seen their like before, but he knew what they were. This was not the usual useless waste of life. This death had a purpose. This man had sacrificed himself, given his life in the service of the God-Emperor to deliver the information on the ceramite chips to one of the many anonymous resistance cells in the hive.

Perdu took a flat, narrow flask from his webbing, and gently poured some of the contents into the pool of mucus, but the water had no effect. He tipped the flask between his lips, and proceeded to wash his mouth out with the remaining liquid, moving the quantity of water around and over his tongue and teeth before gargling with it, and then sending it around again. When he was satisfied, he spat the mixture of water and saliva onto the mucus, and worked the frothing mess with his fingers, fingers that no longer bore surface skin, let alone prints. He had only one pair of gloves, and he would rather risk his skin than their destruction.

After several minutes, Perdu gave up the search, and looked down at the half a dozen mismatched shards lined up on his finger.

His time was up. Suddenly, he knew that the room was no longer safe. He’d stayed too long, and he wouldn’t be able to use the site again. He scraped the chips off his finger into the still-open water flask, and pulled his gloves on. The right one would be useless by the time he took it off again, but there was no time to clean himself up. He could feel the burning in his fingers as the mucus set to work to destroy his flesh.

Perdu pushed the dead man’s filter cap back into his chest, and rolled the corpse onto its side to cover evidence of the mucus; the idiot enemy wouldn’t look under the body. He did not wait for the enemy excubitors to appear with their narrow frames, distended bellies and grotesque masks. They were grey-skinned monsters with plugs and hoses embedded in their pallid flesh, harsh voices translated through grilles that produced guttural combinations of grunts and too much purple spittle.

Out on the street, the quality of the light told Perdu everything. He did not need to look up to know that a glyf was hovering nearby, six or eight metres above his position, its bright runes swirling and pulsing through the air, ready to penetrate the minds of any pute fool enough to look at it. They wafted over populated areas of the planet, checking for those who were not consented, who didn’t carry imagoes in their arms, or whose imagoes limited their free passage. They altered the quality of the air with their ethereal light, and with the buzzing insect noise they made, rising to a pitch when they homed in on some poor transgressor. Perdu smelt the hot acrid bloom of battery acid that the glyfs emitted, judged that the incessant purring noise was stable, and walked in the opposite direction.

He didn’t see the boy, his one connection to an active cell; he didn’t look for him. The lessons were slow to learn, but anything or anyone watching him would see something pass between them, and then they’d both be in trouble. He knew the boy was there; a boy was always there, waiting for the next piece of the puzzle, the next message, the next order. No one knew who was giving the orders. Perdu didn’t know any of the boys’ names, and so far as he was aware, they didn’t know his. He didn’t even know if they were all boys. He didn’t know how many other ayatani priests were involved in resisting, either. He didn’t know how many cells there were in this hive, this agri-works, on this continent, or on the planet. Singular individuals had known these details once, but they were all gone, and those left behind had learned their lessons.

Perdu retreated. He was permanently in retreat. Virtually the entire planet was in retreat. There were rumours of fighting forces in one or two of the larger hives, guerilla stuff, mostly, but very little reliable information was available from one place to another; all comms-channels were under the control of the occupying forces, albeit their security wasn’t impenetrable, and leaks were exploited at every opportunity.

Communications were necessary to the smooth running of the agri-galleries out on the great plains of Reredos, where the land had been given over to food production for the occupying forces and for export off-world. They were feeding the enemy with the foetid purple slop, the fast-growing fleshy pods that putrefied almost before they ripened, spilling out the spores that were killing the stilt-men who tended the plants. They had once provided the finest cereal crops in the galaxy. There had been no compromising the product by hybridisation, no dwarfing, no genetic modifying for higher yields, and virtually no disease-resistance. Eighty per cent of production used to go to slab for the Emperor’s armies, but the rest, the glorious twenty per cent, had provided the raw materials for the foremost hop and barley brews in the Imperium for a thousand years.

The chest filters kept out the worst of the dust from the papery old-gene-stock hops that used to be grown in the galleries, and prevented the workforce breathing on the priceless crops. The best of the stilt-men were rewarded with augmetics that increased their agility and pushed up their quotas. Not only could they tend the tallest, most fragile reaches of the plants, but their telescopic shins could be extended so far that they could also cover vast acreages of the tunnels furthest from the habs and sinks without the need for polluting vehicles.

The great, arched galleries used to spread across the plains, clean and white and gleaming; now two-thirds of them were grey and carbonised, allowing little light in through their purple-stained covers, and the canker was spreading. The hops were long-gone, torn or burned out by the guards who patrolled the agri-works, the workforce toiling around and above them, elegant, fragile by comparison to the pale, angular, barely human beasts that were their keepers.

‘It’s out?’ asked the old man, slouching over a beaker of something that might once have seen the inside of a barrel that might once have held hop-brew, but not recently. The woman standing on the other side of the counter didn’t look at him; she turned the cloth once more around the cloudy glass in her hand and placed it on a shelf.

‘No,’ she said.

‘The chips?’ he asked, shielding the words between his mouth and the beaker he was lifting to it.

‘Passed,’ said the woman.

‘The boy?’ asked the old man as he lowered the beaker back to the counter.

‘No,’ said the woman, moving along the counter to another customer.

They had to get the damned things out of the galleries. More of the tunnels were being cleared for replanting, and the Emperor only knew what the new crop would do to them. The carbonisation would petrify them, or the spores would corrode them, and if not that, the by-products of so many deaths among the agri-workers and the mucus that the survivors scooped out of their filters every day could do just as much harm. They were the most important resource the resisters had, the key to bringing the Imperium to the planet’s rescue.

They couldn’t stay where they were, but getting them out was proving a slow and complex business. Just getting through the first part of the process, making the chips and getting them to the priest, had cost dearly, and time and resources were short.

He couldn’t ask why the priest hadn’t handed the chips to the boy, or what the priest planned to do with them. He was at two removed, so he didn’t even know the priest’s name, or anything about him. He’d return to the cell with nothing. He often did. Nothing had ever been quite so critical; no single thing had ever signified the salvation of the entire planet.

The lasrifle banged and bucked in Bedlo’s hands when it should have made a satisfying krak and held steady. He and his cell-mates had been inside the building for two days, out of sight of the excubitors and the glyfs, trying to turn themselves into an effective resisting force. Practice made perfect.

He issued instructions and advice, his voice sounding too loud between shots. Hand signals were better if the new recruits could learn them, but weapons familiarity was the real priority.

His gakking gun was defective. It was going to take him out as readily as it’d kill the enemy. He lifted the rifle away from his body, pulling the strap over his head, and threw it away in disgust.

‘That’s it,’ he shouted. ‘Debrief.’

Wescoe shouldered her long-las and left Bedlo to it. She’d been doing this for long enough to know what the debrief would involve, and she and Mallet took it in turns to patrol the perimeter of their practice area, to keep the kids safe while they learned how to resist. It was her turn.

Mallet picked up Bedlo’s offending lasrifle and began to strip it down. He said little or nothing, ever, but he knew arms, was obsessed with them. The war had been good to him, and the occupation better.

Bedlo had come to the cell almost by accident when his own, his third, had been destroyed in a skirmish: a stupid mistake caused by one of his cell-mates butting up against the enemy during a routine sweep of their hive quarter. The resulting firefight had taken out several of the enemy guard under a senior excubitor’s command, and, looking for retribution, the enemy had deployed a grenade launcher with great effect. The whole decrepit mess of the quarter had come crashing down, and when the excubitor had counted the bodies, and realised that Bedlo and one or two others had escaped, he set a hound loose.

Whoever the enemy butcher had been, and it was rumoured that he had direct links to the Archon, he’d been thorough. There was still no effective way to take out a wirewolf, and not much chance of avoiding one, either. So this was Bedlo’s fourth resistance cell, his first as leader; he’d only been with them a matter of weeks when they were almost wiped out. He’d jumped two places to take the lead, and began recruiting immediately. He had no idea how long Mallet had been with the cell, but the man was indestructible. He was a born fighter, but lacked the communication skills to lead effectively. Wescoe was effective, too, and clearly a veteran, but she shrank from command, and seemed happy enough for Bedlo to take the lead.

As the cell-mates squatted or stood together in one corner of the room with their backs to the remains of the pitted, charred plasboard walls, facing the imaginary enemy should he infiltrate, Mallet tossed Bedlo the lasrifle end-over-end. The boss caught it in his right hand, and then dropped it vertically through his grip to check the balance. It was better, and there were no dodgy sounds when he caught the housing in his fist. He turned and shot a round. The bang sounded closer to a krak, but not close enough.

Bedlo tossed the weapon back to Mallet.

‘If that’s the best you can do, we need a more reliable weapons supply,’ he said.

Mallet started to strip the las down, again, squatting on his haunches. The boy closest to him, Tilson, shuffled sideways, widening the gap between them. The movement wasn’t lost on Bedlo. Trust wasn’t at a premium, it was non-existent.

Mallet didn’t listen as Bedlo went through the motions.

‘Command,’ he said, raising his index finger as the two new boys watched. ‘Disperse,’ two fingers together, the way a child might make a finger-pistol. ‘Attack,’ a flat hand thrust forwards. The instructions weren’t complicated, but new recruits were always a liability, whether they were young and keen or young and scared, and they were always young.

The perimeter check only took Wescoe a matter of a couple of minutes. There was only one entrance/exit point a couple of hundred metres from the room where the boys were being put through their paces, and a couple of blind corridors to the left and right of the practice room. She was good in the dark, used to it, and didn’t resort to using the lamp-pack that she carried in her webbing. She very soon wished that she had.

Wescoe checked the entrance, ducking to left and right, her long-las raised at her shoulder. There was nothing. She turned, hugging the left-hand wall to her back, the first blind corridor coming up twenty metres away on the right. Then she saw it, a narrow, intermittent beam of grey light. Her hands tensed slightly around the las, and her pupils dilated a fraction as the corridor darkened again. There was just a chance that a glow globe had flickered spontaneously, but the building had been disused and derelict since it had come under heavy fire during the war, years ago, and it seemed unlikely to Wescoe.

‘Voi shet–’ she heard, cut off, and followed by a scuffling sound and a series of thuds. Someone else was in the building. Her cell was not alone.

Wescoe let out the breath that she realised she had been holding, and switched to the right-hand side of the corridor, as the light seemed to have come from the dead-end on the left. She knew that the passage was barely ten metres long before it was cut off by an impenetrable barrier made of the rubble that was all that remained of that wing of the old building. If she had to engage, she had better be fast and efficient. The enemy was right on top of the cell; only a few metres and a bad plascrete wall separated them. A split second later, she was aiming her las into the dark mouth of the blind corridor.

Mallet lifted Bedlo’s lasrifle to check its heft, and thumbed the sight.

They all heard the noise on the other side of the wall. Tilson winced at the sound of the alien tongue as the enemy shouted out, and they heard the scuffling thuds of clumsy bodies. Mallet knew that the enemy was no longer imaginary. He didn’t speak, but he was off his arse and onto one knee, braced in the entrance to the room, almost before they heard the shots fired, and well ahead of the boys properly registering that they were under attack.

He had Bedlo’s weapon in his hand, so he fired it.

Brak!

Even after stripping it down several times, Mallet didn’t trust the las-rifle, so he kept firing it, wild in his right hand while his left went straight to a pistol at his hip. Before Bedlo had turned to shout an order or find a weapon, Mallet was already letting loose an uneven volley of mismatched shots.

Bedlo dropped, flat to the floor, stalling for time he didn’t have.

Tilson, squatting next to him, was staring at him, eyes wide, a hole in his throat. Bedlo listened for a split second to the odd brak of his second-hand, twenty-second-hand, lasrifle. Mallet was doing a job covering them. Then he looked up to see the other boy, Shuey. The little pute had found a gap behind Mallet and was bracing himself against the rock-hard mercenary, using the older man’s shoulder to steady his aim. They half-stood like some bottom-heavy, two-headed creature, three weapons between them, firing at an enemy that Bedlo still hadn’t seen.

Bedlo rolled onto his back and took hold of the improvised flamer that had been assigned to Tilson. He rotated and flipped, and, still flat on his belly, opened up with a splutter of fuel that had begun as promethium, but which had been spent and then filtered, cooled, refined back to low-grade, secondary-use liquid fuel, before being spent again, filtered, mixed with the bio-pute that came off the old hops and rehashed as semi-demi domestic fuel-oil. He didn’t hold out much hope.

The flamer spat a spray of greenish, cloudy liquid, but didn’t catch. Bedlo triggered the igniter, but it was out of synch with the fuel delivery system, such as it was, and clicked uselessly.

Bedlo took a moment, and listened to the weapons discharging. He could hear Mallet’s side arm and the distinctive sound of the old lasrifle, and he could make out the slower, but steady report from Shuey’s weapon, an old Guard-issue las that had belonged to some uncle or other; contraband from a long-lost war that they all still seemed to be fighting, and his passport into the cell. There was no other sound.

In the moment that Bedlo was taking to assess their situation and gauge the danger they were in, Mallet shifted his aim by precisely sixty-two degrees, and ignited the semi-demi with a round from the gakked las.

Bedlo stood, faster than he thought was possible, and then felt like a fool when the ignited fuel produced only a dull yellowish flame and a slow trickle of blackening smoke. It’d leave a scorch-mark on the floor if it was allowed to burn for long enough, but not much else. In any case, it was too little, too late. The battle was already over, and the flamer had played no part in it.

Bedlo held his closed fist in front of him: the signal for cease-fire.

Mallet and Shuey held their weapons, but did not fire again, and the dingy space was quiet. Whoever, whatever, had started the firefight had stopped almost before Mallet had engaged.

Mallet looked at Bedlo.

‘Boss?’ he asked.

‘Where’s Wescoe?’ asked Bedlo.

‘The broad?’ asked Shuey.

‘The broad,’ said Bedlo, crossing to the threshold to check out the results of the attack.

He returned a moment later, carrying the long-las that had belonged to Wescoe, arguably the most useful member of the cell. He’d never called her ‘the broad’ to her face, but that’s what she was, a dangerously efficient killer old broad with more experience than they’d ever live long enough to rack up between them, except perhaps for Mallet. In his other hand was the autopistol belonging to the excubitor that Wescoe had taken out right after he’d shot Tilson in the throat.

Bedlo and Mallet examined the scene. She had died defending them, but had taken at least one of the three enemy guard with her. Their bodies lay beyond the entrance to the practice room and scattered in the mouth of the blind corridor. All the bodies were riddled with shots, and it wasn’t clear who was responsible for the kills, but it didn’t matter. A trail of blood led out towards the exit point, and it was clear that at least one guard had retreated, wounded. Bedlo gestured at the dark stains.

‘She dealt with the immediate threat,’ he said, ‘but he must’ve had a buddy.’

‘Why didn’t she just–?’ began Shuey.

‘Just what?’ asked Bedlo. ‘What would you do stuck with a psychopath and a couple of boys?’

‘And you... Boss,’ said Shuey defiant behind his blushes.

They all heard heavy footfalls approaching, maybe a couple of hundred metres away. Bedlo gestured behind him and they retreated back into the practice room. Bedlo turned and scooped up a tarpaulin that was bunched up against the foot of the wall behind them. He took his boot to the plasboard and, once Shuey realised what he was doing, he joined in. Two hefty kicks each, and the false wall collapsed, allowing the resisters access through the derelict building and into the sinks. Wherever they trained, they always established a way out. It was one thing planning a skirmish or an attack, having a goal in mind, but no one wanted to get caught on manoeuvres with their trousers down and no back door.

‘Haul arse, you stupid pute!’ yelled Bedlo, not bothering with hand signals.

Mallet, guarding the entrance, fired a series of shots into the dark corridor, and then turned swiftly and followed Shuey and Bedlo out through the hole in the wall.

Two occupation guards in mismatched, incomplete fatigues and body-armour elbowed each other and tripped over the excubitors’ bodies as they struggled to get to the resisters, but they were too late. They looked down at Tilson’s body propped against the wall, dead, but upright, and then turned and walked away, apparently satisfied, the expressions on their masks unchanging.

Bedlo, Mallet and Shuey split up to regroup another day, two men down, and two weapons up, and the odds still stacked against them.

‘Logier,’ said the old man, acknowledging the stilt-man as he sat facing the other way and began to dismantle one of his prosthetics, obsessive about maintaining them in pristine condition.

‘Ozias,’ said Logier.

The two men had known each other for Logier’s entire life and for half of Ozias’s. Logier was the son of a friend and colleague, long dead. They understood one another beyond being comrades, friends or allies, and they trusted one another, at least enough to use their names. Ozias had been running the agri-cell since the first threat of attack by the Archenemy eight years before; he had field-control of the low drinking hole, and had recruited the woman who ran the place to keep tabs on the traffic of information for him. The agri-workers would not fight the war; that job was left to the PDF and to a couple of regiments of Imperial Guard caught in the crossfire when they should have been on R&R. Ozias knew that reinforcements would come; that when the Warmaster became aware of the connection, of the precious resources, when he knew why Reredos must be defended, he would send more troops.

‘The chips?’ asked Logier.

‘The priest has them,’ said Ozias. ‘He didn’t pass them.’

Logier turned, and the two men looked at each other for a moment before Logier turned away again.

‘We don’t know why,’ said Ozias. ‘He was slow to evacuate after Calvit gave up the chips, probably trying to resuscitate him.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Logier, returning to the task of maintaining the hydraulics in his shins. ‘I’ll go to him,’ he offered, after a moment. ‘I’ll make sure the chips get to the hive-cell.’

Ozias slumped a little lower in his seat.

‘I wouldn’t ask,’ he said.

‘I’ll go,’ said Logier.

‘Yes,’ said Ozias.

Ozias caught the eye of the woman at the counter, drained his beaker slowly, picked it up, and returned it, without looking at her again, or turning to check on Logier.

It was done.

Ayatani Perdu was not comfortable in the no-man’s-land between the hive and the agri-galleries, but he always found himself there when they were most at risk. He’d been assigned this room two years ago, and used it whenever things got tough in the hive. It was bigger than the other rooms he used, and was part of an old warehouse complex. He knew how the rooms and corridors of the building connected, and how they’d been modified as the building had fallen into disrepair. It had only one storey, and no windows, but the ceiling was high and his voice echoed slightly in the space. The room was closer to the galleries than the hive, but patrols and glyfs were fewer and further between, here, and the boys that transported information were safer, for the most part. It didn’t matter; he used the safest rooms available, and preached his sermons just the same.

There were half a dozen of them in his congregation, again, no more, no less. The vacancy had been filled, and the most active resisters, or those most in need of his ministrations, had taken their places. They had collected in a small group at the far end of the room, not attempting to fill the space.

Perdu felt the chips in the palm of his left hand inside his glove. The right glove was a ragged mess with two fingers missing and was good for very little; it didn’t keep him warm or dry and it wasn’t safe for concealment. The skin that had been so quickly eroded from his fingers by the purple mucus was growing back warm and too pink, and he covered it as best he could with old bandages – washed and reused a hundred times, yellow and fraying, but better than the alternative – and with the half-eaten glove.

‘The Emperor protects,’ he said, low and breathless. He did not want the prayer to end, not knowing what would come after it.

A man at the back of the group coughed, a new man. No one looked at him, but the congregation melted away without a word to their priest, without a murmur or a question, without a suggestion that they were aware of the recent death or of the replacement congregant. They had done what they needed to do, had set up contacts and passed on information, all without fanfare and with absolute discretion. Perdu bowed his head, unwilling to meet the gazes that did not rest on him. He looked down at the stilt-man’s shins, at the gleaming hydraulics, obsessively cleaned, pristine, as if new. No new augmetics had been issued since the invasion, but these didn’t look eight years old.

‘You still have the chips?’ asked Logier.

‘I...’ began Perdu. ‘A man died,’ he said.

‘You know the drill,’ said Logier. ‘We pass information to you, and you pass it to the boy–’

‘So that he can get killed, too,’ said Perdu. ‘That isn’t good enough, any more.’

Logier turned from the priest, and crouched, drawing a stiletto from a sheath concealed in his shin. He made a casual hand signal, hoping the priest would understand. The stilt-man had heard something. The enemy was close.

Perdu dropped to Logier’s left and behind him, and felt his way along the wall into the darkest crevice of the long room, careful not to turn his back. He was crouching in the corner, low on his haunches, but strong in his stance, when he felt something touching his arm. He put out his hand and took hold of the small, cold grip of a weapon that Logier handed to him. His eyes had adjusted to the low light levels and he could see Logier, who appeared to have a lasrifle raised at his shoulder, the stiletto, a bayonet, affixed.

He looked down at the firearm in his hand. It was small and neat, and well cleaned, a defensive weapon, useful at close quarters.

There was a thud, and the thwoom of burning fuel as the room lit up orange and red from the light of a flamer. Still, Perdu couldn’t see the enemy. He watched Logier as the stilt-man darted towards the entrance and fired into the narrow gap between battered wall panels where no door had ever stood. The cacophony from beyond suddenly separated into various sounds in Perdu’s mind, each one crisp and complete, and readable: the weight of a boot hitting an earth floor, the click of a thumb against a trigger, the slow exhale of a sniper taking his shot, the feed mechanism of a misshaped autogun as it struck home, the odd grunt of the enemy.

The enemy, thought Perdu. One enemy. He took several awkward steps, long, but close to the ground, his centre of gravity slightly lower than it would have been had he been standing, and placed a hand on Logier’s back.

Krak! Krak! Logier fired two more shots into the breach, sending ancient plascrete dust cascading from the makeshift walls with a sound like pouring sand.

Perdu thrust an arm over Logier’s shoulder so that the stilt-man could read his signals without moving. The priest pointed at the breach with a single finger and then held that finger upright in front of Logier’s chest. There was no direct line of sight between their position and the enemy’s. There were two of them, and only one opponent.

Thwoom! and the room was lit up anew. The flame hit nothing. It scorched the earth floor of the room a little, crystallising particles and making them glow red, but Perdu and Logier were out of the line of fire, and there was nothing else to burn.

Krak! Krak! Logier returned fire.

Perdu counted to three, rose to his full height and, in one motion, crossed to the right of the breach, Logier’s side arm raised in two hands in front of him. Logier followed Perdu’s lead, stepping forwards as Perdu fired his pistol across the breach, not attempting to engage the enemy.

When Logier stepped into the gap and turned, he was face-to-face with his assailant, less than a metre away, looking the startled foe squarely in his gummed, bloodshot eyes. This one wasn’t wearing a mask. He carried a flamer high on his long back, cradling the business end under his arm while he brought the autogun up to firing position. His torso was naked, the grey skin slick with sweat, and spreading sores clustered around the plugs that sat high up on either side of his chest. Logier took in the entire scene in a split second. He didn’t shoot.

Perdu heard the stiletto bayonet entering enemy flesh once, and then again. He heard the wet sounds of evisceration, and heard the thud of a hard body falling.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Logier, stepping back through the breach, and Perdu followed without thinking.

‘Can I trust you?’ asked Perdu when they had cleared the area and he was sitting in a room in a hab somewhere; he didn’t know where.

Logier laughed.

‘We’re long past trust, priest,’ he said. ‘You don’t know my name, and I don’t know yours, but we have business together.’

‘I won’t pass the chips to a boy and risk getting him killed,’ said Perdu.

‘Then you’d better be up to delivering them,’ said Logier. ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going to take them from you after that little fiasco.’

‘Occupation forces are everywhere,’ said Perdu.

‘Everywhere you are,’ said Logier. ‘You didn’t pass the chips because of them, and they knew where you were again tonight. I’ll pull the plug on this if I have to. I’ll abort. How do I know they’re not onto you? How do I know you’re not a collaborator?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Perdu insisted between gritted teeth.

‘This isn’t a game,’ said Logier, standing to take a dish from a small neat woman who was working at an ancient stove at the far end of the room, too close not to hear what passed between them.

‘Can I trust her?’ asked Perdu, gesturing towards the woman.

Logier laughed again.

‘We knew you’d try to resuscitate him,’ said Logier.

‘What an Emperor-forsaken mess–’ Perdu began.

‘Like I said, it’s not a game,’ said Logier, weary. ‘You took too gakking long. You were being watched, and now the boy’s out of the mix.’

‘I’ll deliver the chips,’ said Perdu.

‘It’s complicated,’ said Logier. ‘It’s crucial. What happens next could change everything. I was told that I could talk to you on a need-to-know.’

‘I don’t want to know,’ said Perdu, ‘I just want to do my part.’

‘Yeah, but you need to know,’ said Logier. ‘We’re organised, effective, and we don’t lose men. The boss sent me because he had no other choice. We need allies in the hive, armed and ready, and we need a safe place to transport...’

‘Transport what?’ asked Perdu.

‘You must’ve heard the stories... We can still win this war, we just need to be ready when–’ Logier said.

‘The Warmaster–’ Perdu began, but Logier interrupted him.

‘The less you know the better for you,’ he said, ‘but you have to know that this is critical. We know there’s a leak, a collaborator. We don’t know who.’

‘And the chips?’ asked Perdu.

‘Directions,’ said Logier, ‘to a cache. We need to get weapons to the outside, to another cell. They need to prove themselves before we can transport out... We can only get the weapons so far.’

‘One of the hive-cells? That’s where the boys run the information to.’

‘The chips contain the coordinates of the cache site, but they need all six. We planned to send them out in batches, but we couldn’t–’

‘You couldn’t sacrifice a second man,’ Perdu finished for him. ‘How do I find the hive-cell? The boy?’

‘He won’t go back to the cell unless you pass him the chips, and that’s impossible, now. I’ve got a name... One of yours.’

‘Mine?’ asked Perdu.

‘A priest called Revere.’

The little woman at the other end of the room had been quiet throughout their conversation, but now she began to move pans and dishes around, making too much noise.

‘You must go,’ said Logier, picking up the woman’s signal. Perdu didn’t answer, he simply rose and turned to go back the way he had come. Logier pointed towards the little woman, who was holding aside a rug that hung on the wall adjacent to the stove, covering a second exit point. Perdu looked from the woman to Logier.

‘Follow your nose for a couple of hundred metres, and then take the north corridor for half a kilometre; you’ll find a landmark.’

Perdu ducked out of the room without another word.

Ayatani Revere stood before Bedlo, Mallet and Shuey, his prayer book clutched between his hands as if he were wringing the life out of it. The fervour in his voice was making Shuey’s eyes shine.

‘The Emperor saves His grace for those who follow Him unto death. Shy not from duty, shy not from ill nor pain, nor suffering. Glory be to our lieutenant, to the Emperor’s lieutenant in all things, to Wescoe for the gift of her life to her comrades, to Reredos and to the Imperium.’

There was silence for a moment, and then Shuey’s hands came together in one resounding clap before he realised that, as stirring as the priest’s speech was, this was no time for applause.

‘With more weapons, with better weapons, Wescoe might not have died,’ said Bedlo.

‘She died to save the rest of us,’ said Shuey.

‘Indeed she did,’ said the priest.

Mallet was sitting on his haunches, his back to the wall, as always, stripping down Bedlo’s las, again. Bedlo looked down at him. The mercenary had continued with his work right through the ayatani’s service to Wescoe. He had not looked up from his task nor joined in the rite. It was as though Wescoe had never existed, as though she didn’t matter to Mallet. In that moment, she mattered very much to Bedlo. His relationship with Mallet had always been strained, but now it reached a tipping point.

Bedlo swung his fist, batting the weapon out of Mallet’s hand. Mallet had a knife to his boss’s throat before anyone had registered what had happened.

‘Steady,’ said the ayatani. There were several moments of tension as the priest appraised the situation; a wrong move now and the cell could be destroyed, and some of its members with it. Revere knew that Mallet was a difficult man and Bedlo was highly strung. The moments stretched on, and Shuey looked pointedly at the priest for an answer to the stand-off. Eventually, the ayatani looked from Mallet to Bedlo, winked, and let out a sustained laugh, loud and low, and long, his mouth wide open.

Mallet withdrew the knife, picked up the discarded las, and returned to his position and his job. Shuey looked from Mallet to the priest, and then to Bedlo for his reaction. Bedlo straightened his jacket and regained a little of his dignity.

‘The information should’ve come through by now,’ he said. ‘Where’s the boy?’

‘He’ll come to me when it’s time,’ said Revere. ‘The agri-cell is strong and able, but they need us. They’ll give you what you want. They’ll share the power, but you’ll have to prove yourselves. There will be more recruits, and more weapons, you can count on that.’

Mallet looked up from adjusting the sights on the las.

‘And more dying,’ he said.

‘If the legends are true,’ said Revere, ‘if they can be proved, the Emperor will save Reredos, and all the dying will be done by the foe.’

Perdu stood at the narrow cross-street beneath the overhang of a disused manufactory, a small, domestic place for making clothes, and looked across at a hole-in-the-wall drinking place run by one of the many widows trying to scrape a living at the arse-end of the hive. A blue light shone for a moment at the basement window, barely visible at ground level but for the soft sheen it gave to the wet walkway. This was the address he’d been given for Ayatani Revere, but he didn’t feel comfortable. He wasn’t sure.

Perdu felt like he’d been dodging excubitors and glyfs far more than usual, and wondered whether Logier was right, whether he was being followed. He took a deep breath and tried to find the courage to cross the street to his destination.

While he was bracing himself, a shutter above Perdu opened a crack and then closed, and moments later someone took hold of the crook of his arm, and began to steer him in the direction he’d been facing.

Perdu didn’t look at his diminutive companion, but knew that it must be a woman or perhaps a boy. He didn’t like the thought of either; he was doing this to save a boy. He rubbed the fingers of his left glove against the palm to make sure that the chips were still there. They were.

Only a couple of metres away from the door to the hovel, Perdu’s companion feigned a fall and thrust a leg out under the ayatani’s feet, sending him crashing to the damp pavement.

Perdu tensed to spring back to his feet and defend himself.

‘Stay down,’ whispered his companion, leaning over him and faking a quick body-search. Perdu shoved his left hand behind his back, and looked into the face of a boy of about fourteen. The kid kicked him hard, once in the gut, and shrieked before making a dash for it.

A little more light spread onto the pavement from behind Perdu as the low door to the hole-in-the-wall opened, and a tall, solid man with a serious expression stepped to his aid. Perdu went along with the conceit, allowing himself to be helped, when no help was needed, leaning on the larger, older man as they both ducked into the drinking-hole. This had to be his contact.

‘You have the information?’ asked Revere as he leaned over Perdu, ostensibly to check his wounds, although there was no one in the room to see them other than the widow.

‘Revere?’ asked Perdu. ‘Aya–’

‘Emperor save us, man,’ said Revere, glaring intently at the younger priest. ‘No names here, and no titles, either.’

Perdu looked into Revere’s eyes for a moment or two, not sure what he was reading there, but fearful nonetheless. Slowly, still looking at the ayatani, he removed his gloves and placed them on a stool close to a small open fire. He put out his hands to feel the warmth of the yellow flames.

‘I’ll warm myself a little,’ said Perdu, ‘and be on my way. There’s no harm done.’

He didn’t look at Revere again, and, after a few minutes, he gathered himself together and left the room as he had found it, except that his gloves still sat on the stool. Revere scooped them up and pocketed them. He rolled an oilcloth rug away from the floor and reached for the handle to the cellar door, set in the planks beneath.

‘The priest?’ Ozias asked the barmaid, his beaker to his lips.

‘Two of ’em,’ said the barmaid.

Ozias had got his confirmation that the chips had finally reached their destination. He put his beaker down on the counter for the widow to clear away, and left.

Revere didn’t look at the chips, he simply gave them to Bedlo, pressing them firmly into his hand.

‘Do what you must, with the blessings of the Emperor,’ said the ayatani.

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Bedlo, looking the priest in the eye.

He waited until the old man had blessed them all and said a prayer over their weapons before leaving them to their plans. Then, leaving Mallet to strip down the lasrifles and autopistol while the others kept watch, Bedlo examined the ceramite chips. He had to take a glass to them, but he was soon able to make out the markings, compass directions inscribed on the obverse of the chips and digits denoting degrees and minutes on the reverse. Working methodically around the compass points from north, Bedlo lined up the chips in order, and then turned them over and read the directions.

He turned to Mallet and said, ‘Give me that map. This can’t be one location.’ Mallet took a wand from his belt, a little longer than a pencil, cylindrical, about half a centimetre in diameter. There was no apparent join in the rod, but Mallet quickly had it in two pieces and was soon extracting something from inside. He shook out a piece of silk about forty-five centimetres square, covered in a morass of fine lines and tiny handwritten labels, all squared off on a grid with an arrow pointing north and coordinates running along two sides.

The map was a rare resource, hand-drawn and redrawn at every opportunity over several years by a former cell-mate, now dead. Mallet blew on the floor between him and Bedlo, throwing up a small cloud of pale dust, and laid the map down, facing his boss.

Bedlo cast his eye methodically over the map, bringing a finger to rest at their current position. He took the empty rod in his other hand until he had rechecked the coordinates, and then tapped the map in two other places, forming an irregular triangle of three points on the map. Then he tapped the first place again, pointing at their initial destination.

‘It’s less than a kilometre from here,’ said Shuey, looking over Mallet’s shoulder. Mallet snatched up the map and began to fold and roll it up again.

‘That must be the site of the cache,’ said Bedlo. ‘The second coordinates are something else.’

‘Nothin’s for nothin’,’ said Mallet. Bedlo looked up and eyed him, suspiciously.

‘The second set of coordinates signify the site of a raid,’ said Bedlo. ‘They want us to do a job, earn our stripes.’

‘And?’ asked Shuey.

Bedlo stretched his hand out at arm’s length in Mallet’s direction.

‘Gimme that,’ he said.

Mallet tossed Bedlo the ancient lasrifle that still didn’t sound right when he fired it. Bedlo weighed it in his hands for a moment. Then he wrapped both his fists around the business end of the barrel, and pulled his arms back and his shoulders around. When he swung, he swung hard, levelling the butt of the rifle squarely at the lumpy, rockcrete cellar wall. The weapon made exactly the sort of krak when it exploded against the wall that it should have been making when he pulled the trigger. He’d hit the wall so hard with the las that the remnant of barrel in his hand was badly bent and virtually unrecognisable. Bedlo dropped it on the floor, but Mallet was already sorting through the debris for salvage.

‘I never want to see that piece of shit again,’ said Bedlo. ‘Get some fuel for the flamer, and I’ll show them how to burn.’

Perdu looked up at the five bowed heads before him. His faithful five stood hunched in an arc around him. All of the faces were familiar, even though their heads were bent and cast in deep shadows. He hadn’t thought to see Logier again, but there he was, looking right at him, his sixth man. He did not bow his head to the Emperor. Perdu held his gaze while he continued to recite the final prayer, and Logier slowly lowered his head, and finally closed his eyes.

‘You came back,’ Perdu said to Logier once the rest had dispersed.

‘A man must find comfort and strength where he can,’ said Logier, without blinking.

Perdu wanted to say something, but couldn’t think what.

‘You want to know that I delivered the chips?’ asked Perdu.

‘No,’ said Logier. ‘Good evening, ayatani.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Perdu, reflexively, as Logier ducked through the low doorway into the dark alley beyond. Perdu tucked his prayer book hurriedly under his cloak, ready to follow the stilt-man. He wanted to confront the agri-worker, but didn’t know why. It didn’t matter; he was too late. There was no one in the alley when Perdu entered it, not even the boy.

Men seldom moved around in groups anywhere on Reredos. Groups made the occupation guards suspicious and the glyfs twitchy. They tolerated twos, but only women and children could move around in groups of three or more, and then not always unmolested.

There was no way that Bedlo’s cell could travel together to the cache, so he split them up and sent them on different routes.

Bedlo would have liked to have the old ayatani on his side, but he didn’t know whether Revere would show up or not. Bedlo wasn’t his boss, and he knew that Revere answered to the Emperor, if he answered to anyone at all, so Bedlo could only give him the time and place of the raid, and wait and see. He was Shuey’s boss, though, and he paired him up with a new recruit called Ailly. Bedlo knew that Shuey was keen and sharp, and would’ve made it into the Guard, no problem, if the war hadn’t cut Reredos off from the Imperium; but he didn’t yet trust Ailly, who had only just joined them and could still prove a liability.

Bedlo had to trust Mallet, despite the tensions between them. He had no choice; the man was virtually a law unto himself. He wasn’t predictable, but he could always be relied upon to turn up for a fight. Bedlo sometimes wondered if he’d switch allegiance, if he ever found his position untenable. It would not surprise him.

Bedlo spotted Mallet halfway along the arterial road out to the galleries, walking south, almost at a right angle to his position, tacking towards their destination. Bedlo was travelling almost directly east–west, and he’d given the boys the long route, circling the lower west quarter of the hive and traveling north to their location.

The cell members would meet at the cache and travel together from there, albeit not in a group that could be picked out by the sentry guards that patrolled close to the skirts of the galleries.

Bedlo wished he had augmetics. He was beginning to feel conspicuous among the stilt-men that lived, ate and slept in this quarter. Still, his pack looked convincing enough, and he’d rigged up an old filter cap to look like it was fitted to his chest. He could be mistaken for an agri-worker at a glance, even if he wouldn’t pass a more thorough inspection. The pack, which was standard-issue for the agri-workers, neatly contained the flamer, which he’d taken from Mallet who had cleaned and prepped it ready for use. Bedlo only hoped that the fuel Mallet had managed to half-fill the reservoir with was actually flammable.

Boys were the same the planet over, and Shuey and Ailly were no exception. It had been so long since augmetics had been issued that the boys working the galleries were indistinguishable from the hivers, and from those that lived in the no-man’s-land between the galleries and the hive proper. The foe sometimes used them for sport, but even as easy pickings they were noisy irritating little putes, and were mostly left alone.

Mallet preferred to zigzag his way along the edge of the hive rather than spend too much time too close to the galleries. He didn’t trust the open land or the regular rows of tunnels extending into the distance. He didn’t like the way they regularised the perspective of the place. He was comfortable in the hive where he could see no further than the next corner or intersection, and no one could see him from any distance, especially the damned glyfs. He wove his way back and forth, along alleys and side-lanes, along the backs of windowless buildings and through endless covered ways. Above was never a good place.

The cache was hidden in an old hop-drying silo in no-man’s-land, one of half a dozen squeezed together onto a shred of land too small to contain them. The round buildings, only four storeys high, stood cheek by jowl with each other. They seemed to bulge outwards, casting heavy shadows against the surrounding manufactories, which had once operated as brew-houses and mash-vats but which now contained the fleshy purple pods and roots that the foe relied on for sustenance. The narrow, dark, round buildings with steep roofs and venting cowls in their chimneys were totally unusable by the Archenemy. They’d tried to store their produce in them with disastrous results. The hot dry air that was good for the papery hops putrefied the enemy crop almost before it had been stowed, and no new use could be found for the frothing black liquid that resulted. The mess had been left, and the buildings with it.

Logier entered the kiln at the south corner of the site. He was able to move around freely, his augmetics his passport to virtually all agri-areas. He would spot the hive-cell, but they would not recognise him, and enemy guards were thin on the ground. Most of the glyfs hovered over the galleries further out that were too distant for the excubitors to patrol effectively. The local population had no interest in the crops, and only those used to working with the foetid vegetation could stand to be anywhere near large quantities of it. There were enough guards to keep an eye on the workforce, but they had become fat and complacent over the three years of occupation, and unfettered access to the crop had made them bloated and slow.

The hop silo was warm and dry, and no longer smelt of anything. The putrid pods had quickly liquefied and then solidified to form a glassy black surface perhaps thirty centimetres deep on the floor. There was a tidemark a metre high on the walls where the original crop had been loaded to, but other than that, there was no sign that the silos had been used for anything other than their intended purpose.

Neither friend nor foe had been near the silos for the better part of three years, so they had become a useful exchange point for goods crossing no-man’s-land, and were a convenient link between hive- and agri-cells.

Logier had added rubberised slips to the spade-like feet of his augmetics, in order to gain some purchase on the glassy floor surface, and he walked across the silo to examine the cache, arranged on pallets and in makeshift containers on the far side of the room alongside a sizeable hand-barrow. Ozias had put together a fine hoard of weapons since the inception of the agri-resistance-cell, and they had plenty to spare for the right cause.

Logier stripped a las out of its canvas cover and held it to his shoulder. Then he pulled out the sight and offered it up to the rifle. He hefted the thing in his hand for a moment, and then separated the pieces and put them back in their cover. He did the same for an autopistol, and then checked a row of flamer-tanks sitting neatly side-by-side on the top of a stack of pallets. None of the weapons were complete, all were broken into their component parts, and fuel and ammunition were stored separately, as per Ozias’s instructions.

If the enemy got hold of the cache they couldn’t use the weapons against the local workforce immediately and, by the time they’d organised themselves, and assembled and loaded the weapons, their tiny minds would, very probably, be on something else, something more immediate.

However, the weapons were not ready for use by the cells, either, so, if they were caught by the enemy guards, they’d better be armed.

Mallet was sitting on his haunches, shoes and socks removed and placed neatly next to him; he always recce’d his surroundings, and he’d taken one look at the shiny black floor and decided bare feet were his best chance of staying upright on it. His back was against the curved far wall of the silo, and he was half-hidden by the pile of pallets that held the flamer tanks. He was assembling, checking and stripping weapons, one by one, working his way, methodically, from the lasguns to the autopistols and then on to the flamers, before checking out the camouflage and the skins full of stink-mash that only the enemy would see fit to drink.

As Bedlo entered by the single door in the silo, Mallet instinctively lifted the autopistol he had just finished checking, and aimed it squarely at his boss. Bedlo didn’t see Mallet for several seconds, and Mallet didn’t make himself known, enjoying the feeling of power and control. Bedlo only knew he was there when Shuey and Ailly poured through the entrance, tripping over each other and skidding on the surface that offered no grip for their boots. The boys couldn’t help laughing as they travelled several metres on their arses, totally out of control. Mallet took aim and shot a round into the glassy floor between them. It was like hitting crystal taffy with a sugar-hammer. Shards of the petrified plant-life spun through the air, collecting light, like black diamonds, on their way to falling with a tinkle back to the glass surface and into the boys’ hair and clothes.

Shuey gagged and doubled over, falling to the hard surface as the shot released the stench of the pods in their live state. Ailly, trying to evade the shot, slid across the floor, landing in a heap against the pallets, knocking several of the empty flamer-tanks onto the smooth, black floor, and beginning the process all over again.

Mallet looked up at Bedlo, the only man still standing, glaring down on him, and said, ‘What?’

Logier had seen all of the cell members entering the silo, only four, and had stayed for a moment or two in case there were others, but could see no likely candidates in the environs. He began to walk away when the shot was fired, and was not tempted to stay to witness whatever madness was going on within. The hive-cell had a reputation, born of a catalogue of misadventure, madness and catastrophe, often with a glamorous,

devil-may-care attitude thrown in for good measure. That was why Ozias had chosen them, and that was why Logier could never see them as a threat.

Shuey was torn between laughing at Ailly trying to regain his feet, and retching at the stink that was coming off the floor shards. Then he caught sight of the stand-off between Mallet and Bedlo. He thought for a moment, and then winked and let out a resounding guffaw, copying the low belly-rumble that Ayatani Revere seemed able to muster up from nowhere at a moment’s notice. The boy stopped struggling, Bedlo turned to look in Shuey’s direction and Mallet went back to checking weapons. The spell was broken.

‘Let’s load the barrow,’ said Bedlo. ‘I want us out of here.’

Logier watched as the barrow wove through the narrow alleys of the under-slum. The hive had always had rents and wastes at the lower reaches, but, since the war and during the occupation, this place had become darker, sadder and more sinister. The people were incomplete specimens, veterans of the agri-galleries or the occupation, men without limbs or senses: the crippled, blind, deaf and damaged, who would never experience the augmetics that were available throughout the rest of the Imperium. They lived out their pitiful existences in this backwater, trading between themselves and collaborating with whomever, whenever the need arose. There was no honour among thieves or vagabonds, only survival, which, three years deep into the occupation, meant that everyone was life-limited, and everyone knew it.

The under-slum was also the favourite haunt and hunting ground of the basic-grade enemy troops, the mindless animals that did the bidding of the Archenemy. They were tough, cruel beings, without hearts or minds, any moral compasses they might once have had stripped out and trampled long ago. They were, by turns, brutal and lazy, and they took pleasure in the most vicious side of life. The deaf, blind and legless were easier to kill than the hivers or agri-workers, and no one counted the bodies.

The under-slum was where the bestial element of the enemy forces took their R&R and exercised their pleasures: hunting, torturing, brutalising, raping and taking revenge for the horrors meted out to them by their superiors. The locals didn’t fight back, but only begged for a faster death; no one was naive enough to beg to live.

Fresh enemy troops had been brought into Reredos in the usual rotation, and the outgoing guards were filling their boots in the under-slum before being shipped out. The place was teeming with hundreds of bodies, hungry and thirsty for food, drink and violent sport of all kinds, and the hive-cell was moving in to supply a share of that.

Bedlo had instructed the boys in loading the hand-barrow while Mallet checked weapons. They all discarded the arms they were carrying, except for Mallet, who trusted nothing more than the autopistol that had served him so well for so long; it didn’t stop him bagging a Guard-issue long-las, though, just for good measure. Shuey gave up his uncle’s rifle without a second glance when he saw what was on offer from the cache, and soon both of the boys were carrying their weight in arms. Mallet didn’t like it. He didn’t like any of it. He wanted to carry the arms they could use and stash ammunition.

He wasn’t the boss, but when he looked hard at the boys, they both cowered a little. He gestured at the weapons.

‘Put them back,’ he said.

The boys turned from Mallet and looked to Bedlo for a decision.

‘Take one good weapon each,’ he said. ‘The rest aren’t going anywhere.’ Shuey took a lascarbine and Ailly a rifle, and they all began to fill their pockets and webbing with ammo. Mallet didn’t want to bother with flamers, either, given that it was virtually impossible to get decent fuel for them, but Bedlo had become obsessed with the weapon since he’d destroyed his brakking las, and Mallet didn’t want to go up against the boss.

Bedlo and Mallet lay flat on their bellies on the hand-barrow. It was too risky for anyone to be seen carrying a weapon, so they were all stowed on the barrow with the two men, and the whole lot was covered in skins containing the stink-mash brewed by the agri-cell for enemy consumption. The unarmed boys yoked themselves to the handles and rolled the barrow out of the silo and into no-man’s-land. The occupation forces didn’t waste glyfs on the under-slum, and, if anybody asked, they were doing the work of the Archenemy, delivering contraband mash to the troops. No one would prevent them; these things were understood and tolerated. The enemy troops were expected to blow off steam in the under-slums, making them more reliable in their dull duties, and downing huge quantities of stink-mash was one of the ways they accomplished that. They would drive straight into the midst of drunken enemy troops at their most vulnerable and take them out, wholesale.

Dozens of the enemy animals would be packed into ‘The Drum’, the old playhouse in the east quarter of the under-slums. It had once listed up-and-comers and has-beens on its cheap hoarding, but now it was a kind of freak-show. Anyone could tread the worn, battered boards of the raised platform stage while the baying crowd took potshots at them, with coin or curses, often with the food in their paws, but rarely with live ammo. A beast might saunter onto the stage to strike or strangle an act that didn’t satisfy; two or three might rush the platform to tear some hapless dancing cripple limb from limb for looking at them the wrong way. The risks were high and the rewards scant, but people still came to try their luck. Troops on R&R were generally discouraged from carrying weapons as mortality rates among the basic grade had been very high in the early days of the occupation. Without enemies to fight, they made enemies of each other.

Shuey and Ailly hauled the barrow into the kitchens at the rear of The Drum, and waited. The streets had been buzzing with the enemy, two, maybe three times as many of them as usual, but The Drum was quiet. Perhaps it was too early for it to fill up.

Bedlo looked towards Mallet, under the weight of their camouflage. Mallet’s eyes were only centimetres from his, but Bedlo could read no expression in them.

‘Boss?’ asked Shuey, trying to see through the skins and canvas-covers to get instructions from Bedlo.

Bedlo didn’t answer, not yet, but kept looking into Mallet’s eyes, trying to appraise the situation, trying to work out why it was so quiet.

‘I’ll see if I can find someone,’ said Shuey to the other boy. ‘Keep guard.’

Keep guard, Bedlo thought, lying on his belly with his lasgun poised. He’s not armed, and he’s never done this before, and Shuey tells him to ‘keep guard’.

‘Yo!’ shouted Shuey as he disappeared through a swing door.

Then nothing.

Several minutes passed. Then there was an odd, bestial roar.

Shuey pushed through the swing door that he felt sure would lead him further into The Drum. He’d expected to be stopped on the way through the under-slum. He hadn’t been with the cell for long, no one lasted long in an active cell that took risks, but he knew that nothing ever went to plan, that something always went wrong. The barrow wasn’t stopped and the four men travelled all the way to the playhouse without drawing any attention. Odd.

Shuey began to whistle, low in his throat, in an attempt to make his breathing even. He was nervous. Why was he nervous? Why was it so quiet?

Shuey found himself in a large, dark space with a low flight of steps to his left. He wanted to get a view of the room and assess where the enemy would enter from, how easy it would be to hide in the space and pick the animals off, one at a time, or mow them down with the flamers.

It was good that they were early. They’d have time to recce, to set up. They’d be in and out, safe and sound, in no time.

‘Yo!’ shouted Shuey, again.

He stepped out onto the boards, his knees soft, his body bent over slightly in a classic sneaking-about pose. He didn’t have a gun. He should’ve armed himself before coming through that door.

Shuey’s eyes adjusted to the light and he turned to look out into the room. He thought he spotted something, maybe ten metres away at the back of the room. Then he thought he heard something, a shuffling, grunting sound.

Shuey blinked as they came into view, five metres away, walking towards him. There were a couple of dozen of them at least. They weren’t drunk, and they weren’t partying. They hadn’t left their weapons at home to keep their hands free for slapping men, feeling up women, and grabbing at any food that passed within a metre of them.

They were tall, hard, dirty creatures with distended bellies and arched backs, wearing stained, mismatched fatigues; many of them also wore the masks. They carried blades and cudgels, and lasguns and flamers. The angular excubitor in the middle had a flamer strapped to his back that was leaking a clear, pinkish drip of promethium from the hose that was pointing at him, and a heavy brass collar around his neck, pierced for plug-ins.

Shuey tried to make himself smaller, caving his chest in and pushing his knees together as the fresh smell of his own urine assaulted his nostrils.

The creature with the flamer spat a gob of lumpy phlegm onto the floor in front of him. Shuey’s eyes moved involuntarily to inspect it; it was frothing and purple and smelled of infected lungs, bad breath and stink-pods.

‘Voi leng atraga,’ said the creature, and thumbed the trigger on his flamer. The brute next to him elbowed him in the side, indicating that he shouldn’t set fire to the little pute, and stepped forward, bouncing a flattened, club-shaped cudgel off his high, narrow shoulder.

Shuey saw the first swing come as if in slow motion. He wanted to duck, but didn’t, because the blow was coming at his waist height, not around his head. If he’d had his wits about him, he might have stepped back, out of range, but his wits were currently evacuating his body via his backside, so there wasn’t a hope of relying on them for anything.

The first blow winded Shuey with a faint boof! And he thought he heard a couple of his ribs breaking. His eyes were very large and his feet were still planted on the boards. Why hadn’t he fallen over?

The thought struck him that he was on the stage in The Drum. He knew what happened here. All the world crossed that stage, and plenty of it never made it to the other side.

He looked hopelessly out at the enemy troops gathered around the skirts of the stage. It didn’t matter what he did, Shuey was dead. He tried to purse his lips and blow, but no sound came out. He tried to dance, but his feet wouldn’t move. His eyes grew huge as he saw the lasgun aimed at him. The aim lowered and a shot was fired.

Shuey’s knee buckled, and he clutched at it as he went down.

‘Ut dreh!’ said one of the guards.

Shuey placed his hands flat on the floor of the stage and tried to take his weight, but his left hand had landed in the pool of blood and slid out from under him.

‘W-what... magir?’ gasped Shuey.

‘Get up,’ said the trooper again.

Shuey stood on his one good leg for long enough to have that shot out from under him.

He didn’t live for long once the enemy beasts were on the stage with him. No one on Reredos had died with dignity for three years, but few had perished with less than Shuey could muster on that stage.

Finally, Shuey’s broken body was tossed off the stage, and a whoop went up. Their appetites whetted, the foe wanted more, and they wanted it now.

They started to stamp their feet and jeer, and a fight or two broke out among the couple of dozen blood-hungry beasts.

Ailly stood next to the hand-barrow not at all sure of what he should do next. His face was white and his eyes huge as the whoop went up. The last thing he had heard was Shuey calling out ‘Yo!’ as he left the kitchens, but that was minutes ago, and this was bestial, aggressive and frightening. The boy had never heard the like before. He was still standing, aghast, when Mallet handed him a weapon.

The boss had a flamer on his back and a long-las in his hand, and appeared to have stuffed several grenades into the front of his jacket as hard-looking lumps bulged there. Mallet carried his faithful autogun and the long-las was slung over his shoulder.

‘What about...’ Ailly began, finding his voice for a moment.

‘They’re through there,’ said Bedlo. ‘It’s time.’

‘But...’ the boy began again. He was trembling, and he didn’t think that he could move his feet.

Mallet slapped Ailly once, hard on his back, almost propelling him forwards with the force of what was supposed to be a comradely, reassuring gesture, and handed him his rifle.

Bedlo moved to the door into The Drum proper, and held up the forefinger of his left hand: command. Then he held his flat palm out in front of him. Mallet stood beside Bedlo, ready, as always. The boy wondered if he would ever be ready.

The next moment, they were through the doors and into the darkness of the playhouse. Bedlo fired up his flamer and orange light spread before them, picking out the enemy, one at a time, lined up in front of them, in formation. They were ready, too, and there were a lot of them.

Ailly heard an odd rattling sound right next to him that made him jump. He lifted his hand slowly towards his face, the hand that should have been holding his weapon. He realised that the sound was his rifle falling to the floor. He had lost his grip on it. He had lost his grip on everything.

He could see the strange, angry men facing him, walking towards him as if through water, slowly and deliberately. He could not see their mouths moving behind the strange impassive expressions on their masks, but he could hear a long, slow moan that didn’t sound like words at all. He couldn’t hear the krak of Mallet’s las, but he could see the blast residue of individual shots issuing from its barrel.

What was happening? In the Emperor’s name... What was happening?

Mallet was the first to fire. He had fought his entire life. He had skirmished and ambushed; he had stood on the front line and been the last to retreat; he had fought at any distance, fired any weapon and indulged in hand-to-hand combat when there was no other option. He had never faced down so many of the enemy at close quarters, without hope.

He fired his las almost continuously, picking off any target he could home in on instinctively. Death held no fear for him; it didn’t even make him angry. He had been killing for eight years, legitimately. He’d been killing for twenty years. He’d lived killing, and he would die killing, given the chance.

Bedlo triggered his flamer and watched as the scene was revealed. It was not what he had been led to expect.

This was not how it was supposed to be. How had this happened? Why had this happened? Who had betrayed them? Where was Shuey? Why hadn’t he come back to warn them? How many of the enemy were standing in front of him? Was there any way to retreat? Could they escape? How many could he kill before it was over? How had this happened? Who was to blame?

Three minutes later, Mallet was astounded to realise that he was still alive, and still shooting.

The boss had given up on the flamer, and was shooting his las into a crowd of enemy soldiers that he could barely make out in the gloom.

Ailly had not managed to fire a single shot. His feet were planted heavily and his arms were limp at his sides. Everything was happening very slowly, and he thought it had been hours since they’d left the kitchens.

Somehow, the animals had managed to separate the boy from Mallet and Bedlo. The more experienced resisters had moved slowly to the right, away from the stage and the worst of the fire that was being returned by the enemy.

Bedlo didn’t know what he was hitting, if he was hitting anything, but he knew that he wasn’t being hit. It was as if they were missing him on purpose. Bedlo and Mallet wove to the right. The boy didn’t move.

The enemy formed around Ailly, almost ignoring the two older men. They started to laugh and point. They got very close to him. The boy thought that he was going to stop breathing. They wanted him to move; he wanted to oblige, but he couldn’t.

Someone took a potshot at the floor. At least, Ailly thought the foe was shooting at the floor, but then he felt something in his foot. It was wet and hot. He didn’t dare look down, and he couldn’t fall down. What were they saying? Why couldn’t he see their mouths move, but could hear their strange grunts? Nothing would come into focus.

Then one of the foe picked Ailly up, over his shoulder, and took him up the steps onto the platform. He stood the boy back on his feet, and jumped off the stage, back into a pack of his comrades.

Ailly was mute and incapable. His eyes were blurry and he still couldn’t hear properly. He wasn’t terrified any more, though. He couldn’t possibly stay so terrified for so long.

He wanted to do what they wanted him to do, but he didn’t know what that was. He didn’t know that Shuey had danced and convulsed for them. He didn’t know they’d had their sport before they’d killed him. He should be dead already.

There was a square of light, suddenly, in front of him. Two dozen enemy beasts were silhouetted, back-lit by the door that opened out into the daylight. Everything came back to Ailly in a rush. He could hear the howls and jeers of the crowd, and see the enemy as they turned to face the intruder. He could smell the blood that Shuey had left on the stage. He could feel the pain in his wounded foot. He could feel the muscles in his gut clenching around his stomach, and the heave in his oesophagus as his body reacted to the situation.

His movement still wasn’t voluntary, but whatever was compelling Ailly’s body to react forced him to lean over before he emptied the contents of his stomach onto the stage. He could not stand after that.

Whether bored or exasperated, or simply reactive, someone shot the man that had opened the external door to the playhouse, more than one someone. The tall, grizzled old man went down under a hail of fire. He died, instantly, from one of the seventeen shots that found ways into his torso before he fell.

Ailly didn’t recognise the man who had come to their aid; he only saw his dark outline jolting against the light with the impact of las-fire. He was conscious now, more conscious than he had been since entering the kitchens, and it was his conscious state that killed him. The boy dropped slowly, silently to the floor, without a single shot being fired in his direction, and without any fanfare or any sign that he was about to die. It didn’t matter what had killed him. It didn’t matter whether it was a stroke or a heart attack. It didn’t matter whether an aneurysm had erupted in his fragile body.

Ailly died without a fight, without firing a shot, and with only a flesh wound in his foot to show that he had been in any danger. There was no dignity. There was never any dignity.

Bedlo and Mallet turned as the playhouse door was thrown open to the scene. For a split-second, Bedlo thought that someone was coming to the rescue, perhaps the cell that had armed them. For a moment, he had hope. Mallet felt nothing, but simply kept on shooting at the enemy, glad of the extra light, once he had squinted the suddenness of it out of his eyes.

He did not wonder why the enemy was not shooting at them. He knew why.

After killing the last man in, the enemy returned to taunting Mallet and Bedlo. The boy had pissed them off by dying before he’d done anything to entertain them, and they wanted their revenge. They wanted something so badly that several of them had embarked on pitched battles between themselves, and three had died at the hands of their comrades. Bedlo and Mallet had injured several others between them, but both of their kill-rates increased dramatically with the extra light that was coming in through the door that no one had bothered to close.

Mallet kept shooting all the time that no one was shooting back to kill. He wanted to give them a dose of their own medicine, and started to aim at legs and arms instead of heads and chests.

The beasts started to work on separating Mallet and Bedlo. It didn’t matter any more. They were very close. Mallet watched one of the animals swing at the boss’s head, making him stagger. Then, another swung at his knees, and Bedlo was having trouble standing. Then two more started shooting at the floor, close to Bedlo’s feet, and Mallet saw the boss’s head bobbing up and down to his left. It looked for all the world as if Bedlo was dancing.

Mallet kept aiming and kept shooting, all the time keeping one eye on Bedlo’s progress. Soon Mallet was looking up at his boss as he stood on the wooden stage, beaten and bloodied. Mallet swung his las over his shoulder and took the three paces required to pick up the flamer that Bedlo had shrugged off several minutes earlier.

He’d never done what he was about to do. He’d seen it done, once, by some psycho fool in the Guard who’d known what he was doing, and whose actions had made them all cheer and whoop. He didn’t know if he could do it. He knew that doing it inside was suicide, so, he’d be dead, either way.

Most of the enemy beasts were facing the stage, watching their macabre little show. Mallet took hold of the flamer’s strap, and felt the weapon’s weight in his hand. The tank wasn’t full, by any means, but there ought to be enough.

Mallet took his autopistol in his right hand, and started to swing the flamer in his left. Once he’d got the momentum up a little, he turned to face the stage, and, using the weight of the flamer’s tank, he swung the weapon through the air, letting go of it at the top of its arc. He didn’t have time to aim the autopistol in the confined space, and fired it almost as soon as he’d loosed his missile. The flamer had gone almost straight up, and bounced off one of the tie-beams that held the building together. It plummeted back down, exploding a very little above head height, spraying great gouts of flames out over the heads of the enemy. Above was never a good place.

The flamer had gone up almost vertically, and come down the same way. Mallet was standing directly beneath the explosion, the autopistol still pointing roughly in the direction of the fuel tank. He was the first to die, but he took half a dozen of the enemy with him. The beasts’ attention was torn away from the unfortunate man limping around in circles on the stage in front of them, most of it.

Those still involved in skirmishes furthest from the stage heard the explosion and felt the building shake, but they were close to the door left open by the intruder, and tumbled out laughing and hooting, forgetting what they’d been squabbling over.

Several more of the enemy managed to pick themselves up in the first moments after the explosion began to subside, and made their way out of the building, staggering, limping and complaining.

One of the last survivors looked around for a minute or two, dazed by the explosion. He finally found what he was looking for. He bent over a tall body with bulbous joints in the mismatched fatigues and body-armour that the foe wore, and hefted the thing over to look at its face. He took the dead head in his hands and gently knocked foreheads with it. Then he looked up at the man still staggering around on the stage. He aimed his laspistol at the wretch a total of seven times. Six of the bullets maimed. When the last came, Bedlo was going insane, wondering if his end would ever come. The final round detonated one of the grenades in his chest, and then another, making his corpse jolt and squirm on the stage, too late to entertain the troops.

The fire did not burn for long. There was no one to make repairs on The Drum, and no supplies with which to make them. Some of the under-slum dwellers made a crust or two cleaning out the blood, shit and bodies. It was a good day, and the show went on again the day after, despite charring to the stage and a few new stains to the ceiling.

When Logier paid off the cleaners, he took evidence of all the dead cell members, including the old ayatani priest, Revere, who’d come through the front door, bold as brass. The Archon wouldn’t be too impressed by the number of his troops that had gone down at The Drum, but it had to be worth it to take out a cell, and break the morale of resistance fighters everywhere. He’d proven his worth as a collaborator, and made a fool of the old man.

Ozias stood in the entrance to the alley at the rear of The Drum, watching Logier complete his transactions with the low-lifes that had done his bidding. He pressed his back against the wall of the alley as Logier passed him, tossing something up into the air and catching it. Ozias tucked in behind him where he couldn’t be seen. He would move fast, before they’d left the under-slum.

Two or three minutes later, Ozias got his chance. Logier turned down a narrow alley between overhanging buildings, little more than a dim corridor, the light at the end several hundred metres away.

Before Logier had a chance to turn and see who had followed him into the alley, Ozias moved up quickly behind him and put his bolt-pistol to the back of the traitor’s head, taking it off with one shot. He caught the body as it fell, and laid it down close to the wall of the alley. He preferred to be face to face with the enemy, but saw no advantage in taking that chance with Logier.

Ozias had learned a long time ago never to trust anyone, but, in a pinch, he might have trusted Logier. He would have been wrong. It was impossible to know whether the remaining members of his cell were faithful, but he sincerely hoped so. This clean-up operation had cost him weapons, and men had died; however reckless the men of the hive-cell had been, however much of a liability, resistance fighters had died.

Ozias emptied Logier’s pockets, taking the evidence collected from Bedlo’s, Mallet’s, Shuey’s, Ailly’s and Ayatani Revere’s bodies. He would give them to the priest, Perdu, to inter.

Ayatani Perdu could feel the damp sod of the floor beneath his feet. These little rooms with floors that never dried out were havens to the half a dozen worshippers that came to his services. Sometimes he wondered how that could be.

They had died. They had all died. The two men, the two boys and the tough old ayatani had all perished, and for what?

They were supposed to be fighting for the same thing, for the preservation of some form of the Imperium on Reredos. They were supposed to be fighting against the enemy, for the people. The factions had been exposed. Their lives had proven to be as disposable as they had ever been to the foe. Perdu looked from one face to another. He did not recognise any of the congregation. He thought about feeling fear, but he couldn’t. The only emotion available to him now was resignation.

Perdu let his eyes fall to the prayer book that he held open in his hands. He did not need to look on the words, they were engraved indelibly in his mind, but he looked at them anyway. He looked for comfort in them, but found that he felt only that the inevitable would happen, and that maybe it was better in the end.

Perdu finished his prayer, but remained standing with his head bowed over his book. As he looked at the words, a button appeared in the spine-fold of the open pages. It was domed and heavily engraved, with a thick ring shank on it. He could read a single word encircled by the shank. It read, ‘pray’.

He did not look up, and was not surprised when a second button dropped onto the pages of the book, a pair to the first. The shank encircled the word, ‘mercy’.

Within moments a third button had been dropped onto the book, and then a fourth, a fifth and a sixth. The room was empty.

Ozias and the five remaining members of his cell left the young ayatani priest to his musings. It was the first and last time that they ever attended a service together with someone other than their own priest, but these were unusual times. This was the beginning of something; this was the beginning of a plan to rescue the entire planet.

Perdu looked down at the buttons scattered on the pages before him, their shanks gleaming bright gold in the dim light, casting highlights and shadows on the pages; the shanks circling some words, and the domes of the buttons covering or overshadowing others.

Perdu read the six words in their golden rings. ‘Pray to the lady for mercy’.

He took up one of the buttons between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and realised that the light wasn’t shining off it, but was emanating from it. He looked at the domed surface of the ring, and saw, among the deep engraving and the glistening gems, not only a thing of great beauty and value, but something of worth beyond anything that he could comprehend. The button bore the sigil, crest and arms of the Lady, the Beati, Saint Sabbat.

She had worn the buttons on her breast, had blessed them with her association. The Lady had found a following on Reredos because she had been part of its history, and must now represent the better part of the planet’s importance to the Emperor. How could the God-Emperor forsake His daughter? How could He forsake them?