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One

Zoica Rising

‘The distinction between trade and warfare is seen only by those who have no experience of either.’

— Heironymo Sondar, House Sondar, from his inaugural address

The klaxons began to wail, though it was still an hour or more to shift-rotation.

The people of the hive-city paused as one. Millions of eyes checked timepieces, faltered in their work, looked up at the noise. Conversations trailed off. Feeble jokes were cracked to hide unease. Young children began to cry. House soldiery on the Curtain Wall voxed in confirmation and clarification requests to the Main Spine command station. Line supervisors and labour-stewards in the plants and manufactories chivvied their personnel back into production, but they were uneasy too. It was a test, surely? Or a mistake. A few moments more and the alarms would shut down again.

But the klaxons did not desist.

After a minute or so, raid-sirens in the central district also began keening. The pattern was picked up by manufactory hooters and mill-whistles all through the lower hive, and in the docks and outer habs across the river too. Even the great ceremonial horns on the top of the Ecclesiarchy Basilica started to sound.

Vervunhive was screaming with every one of its voices.

Everywhere, hazard lamps began to spin and flash, and secondary storm shutters cycled down on automatic to block windows. All the public-address plates in the city went black, erasing the glowing lines of weather, temperature, exchange-rate data, the local news and the ongoing output figures. They fuzzed darkly for a few seconds and then the words ‘Please stand by’ scrolled across all of them in steady repeats.

In the firelit halls of Vervun Smeltery One – part of the primary ore processing district just west of the Spoil – rattling conveyers laden with unprocessed rock shuddered to a halt as automatic safeties locked down. Above the main smelter silo, Plant Supervisor Agun Soric got up from behind a file-covered desk and crossed to the stained-glass window of his bureau. He looked down at the vast, halted plant in disbelief, then pulled on his work-jacket and went out onto the catwalk, staring at the thousands of milling workers below. Vor, his junior, hurried along the walk, his heavily booted feet ringing on the metal grill, the sound lost in the cacophony of hooters and sirens.

‘What is this, chief?’ he gasped, coming close to Soric and pulling the tubes of his dust-filter from his mouth-clamp.

Soric shook his head. ‘It’s fifteen thousand cubits of lost production, that’s what the gak it is! And counting!’

‘What d’you reckon? A malfunction?’

‘In every alert system in the hive at once? Use your brain! A malfunction?’

‘Then what?’

Soric paused, trying to think. The ideas that were forming in his mind were things he didn’t really want to entertain. ‘I pray to the Emperor himself that this isn’t…’

‘What, chief?’

‘Zoica… Zoica rising again.’

‘What?’

Soric looked round at his junior with contempt. He wiped his fat, balding brow on the back of his gold-braided cuff. ‘Don’t you read the news-picts?’

Vor shrugged. ‘Just the weather and the stadium results.’

‘You’re an idiot,’ Soric told him. And too young to remember, he thought. Gak, he was too young himself, but his father’s father had told him about the Trade War. What was it, ninety years back, standard? Surely not again? But the picts had been full of it these last few months: Zoica silent, Zoica ceasing to trade, Zoica raising its bulwarks and setting armaments up along its northern walls.

Those raid-sirens hadn’t sounded since the Trade War. Soric knew that as a bare fact.

‘Let’s hope you’re right, Vor,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope it’s a gakking malfunction.’

In the Commercia, the general mercantile district north of the Main Spine, in the shadow of the Shield Pylon, Guilder Amchanduste Worlin tried to calm the buyers in his barter-house, but the sirens drowned him out. The retinues were leaving, gathering up servant trains and produce bearers, making frantic calls on their vox-links, leaving behind nothing: not a form-contract, not a promissory note, not a business slate and certainly none of their funds.

Worlin put his hands to his head and cursed. His embroidered, sleet-silk gown felt suddenly hot and heavy .

He yelled for his bodyguards and they appeared: Menx and Troor, bull-necked men in ivory-laced body-gloves with the crest of Guild Worlin branded on their cheeks. They had unshrouded their laspistols and the velvet shroud-cloths dangled limply from their cuffs.

‘Consult the high guild data-vox and the Administratum links!’ Worlin spat. ‘Come back and tell me what this is, or don’t come back at all!’

They nodded and went off, pushing through the packs of departing traders.

Worlin paced back into his private ante-room behind the auction hall, cursing at the sirens to shut up. The very last thing he needed now was an interruption to trade. He’d spent months and a great deal of Guild Worlin funds securing mercantile bonds with Noble House Yetch and four of the houses ordinary. All of that work would be for nothing if trade – and income – went slack. The whole deal could collapse. His kin would be aghast at such losses. They might even strip him of his badge and remove his trading rights.

Worlin was shaking. He crossed to the decanter on the wrought-brass stack table and was about to pour himself a hefty shot of ten-year-old joiliq to calm his brittle mood. But he paused. He went to his desk, unlocked a drawer with the geno-key that he kept around his wrist on a thin chain and took out the compact needle pistol.

He checked it was primed and armed, then fetched the drink. He sat back on his lifter throne, sipping his liquor and holding his badge of credit – the mark of his rank – gazing at the Worlin crest and its bright ornament. He waited, the weapon in his lap.

The klaxons continued to wail.

At carriage station C4/a, panic had begun. Workers and low-classers who had ventured into the mercantile slopes for a day’s resourcing began to mob every brass-framed transit that trundled in along the cogged, funicular trackway. Carriages were moving out towards the Outer Habs and the Main Spine alike, overloaded, some doors only half closed.

Crowds on the platforms, shivering at each yelp of the alarms, were getting fractious as more and more fully laden transits clattered through without stopping. A slate-seller’s stall was overturned in the press.

Livy Kolea, hab-wife, was beginning to panic herself. A body-surge of the crowd had pushed her past the pillars of the station atrium. She’d kept a firm grip on the handles of the child-cart and Yoncy was safe, but she’d lost sight of Dalin.

‘My son! Have you seen my son?’ she asked, imploring the frenzied crowd that washed around her. ‘He’s only ten! A good boy! Blond, like his father!’

She grabbed a passing guilder by the sleeve. A rich, lavish sleeve of painted silk.

‘My son–’ she began.

The guilder’s bodyguard, menacing in his rust-coloured mesh, pushed her aside. He jerked the satin shroud off the weapon in his left hand, just briefly, as a warning, escorting his master on. ‘Take the hand off, gak-swine,’ his vox-enhanced larynx blurted gruffly, without emotion.

‘My son–’ Livy repeated, trying to push the child-cart out of the flow of bodies.

Yoncy was laughing, oblivious in his woollen wrap. Livy bent down under the segmented hood of the cart to stroke him, whispering soft, motherly words.

But her mind was racing. People slammed into her, teetering the cart and she had to hold on to keep it upright. Why was this happening – to her – now? Why was it happening on the one day a month she carriaged into the lower Commercia to haggle for stuff? Gol had wanted a new pair of canvas mittens. His hands were so sore after a shift at the ore face.

It was such a simple thing. Now this! And she hadn’t even got the mittens.

Livy felt tears burst hot onto her cheeks.

‘Dalin!’ she called.

‘I’m here, mam,’ said a little voice, half hidden by the klaxons.

Livy embraced her ten-year-old son with fury and conviction, like she would never let go.

‘I found him by the west exit,’ a new voice added.

Livy looked up, not breaking her hug. The girl was about sixteen, she reckoned, a trash from the outer habs, wearing the brands and piercings of a hab-ganger.

‘He’s all right though.’

Livy looked the boy over quickly, checking for any signs of hurt. ‘Yes, yes he is… He’s all right. You’re all right, aren’t you, Dalin? Mam’s here.’

Livy looked up at the outhab girl. ‘Thank you. Thank you for…’

The girl pushed a ringed hand through her bleached hair.

‘It’s fine.’

The girl made Livy uneasy. Those brands, that pierced nose. Gang marks.

‘Yes, yes… I’m in your debt. Now I must be going. Hold on to my hand, Dalin.’

The girl stepped in front of the cart as Livy tried to turn it.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘Don’t try to stop me, outhab! I have a blade in my purse!’

The girl backed off, smiling. ‘I’m sure you have. I was just asking. The transits are packed and the exit stairs are no place for a woman with a kid and a cart.’

‘Oh.’

‘Maybe I could help you get the cart clear of this press?’

And take my baby… take Yoncy for those things scum like you do down in the outer habs over the river!

‘No! Thank you, but… No!’ Livy barked and pushed the gang-girl aside with the cart. She dragged the boy after her, pushing into the thicket of panic.

‘Only trying to help,’ Tona Criid shrugged.

The river tides were ebbing and thick, ore-rich spumes were coursing down the waters of the Hass. Longshoreman Folik edged his dirty, juddering flatbed ferry, the Magnificat, out from the north shore and began the eight-minute crossing to the main wharves. The diesel motor coughed and spluttered. Folik eased the revs and coasted between garbage scows and derelicts, following the dredged channel. Grey estuary birds, with hooked pink beaks, rose from the scows in a raucous swirl. To the Magnificat’s port side, the stone stilts of the Hass Viaduct, two hundred metres tall, cast long, cold shadows across the water.

Those damn sirens! What was that about?

Mincer sat at the prow, watching the low-water for new impediments. He gestured and Folik inched the ferry to starboard, swishing in between the trash hulks and the river-sound buoys.

Folik could see the crowds on the jetty. Big crowds. He grinned to himself.

‘We’ll make a sweet bundle on this, Fol!’ Mincer shouted, unlooping the tarred rope from the catheads.

‘I think so,’ Folik murmured. ‘I just hope we have a chance to spend it…’

Merity Chass had been trying on long-gowns in the dressing suites of the gown-maker when the klaxons first began to sound. She froze, catching sight of her own pale, startled face in the dressing mirror. The klaxons were distant, almost plaintive, from up here in mid-Spine, but local alarms shortly joined in. Her handmaids came rushing in from the cloth-maker’s vestibule and helped her lace up her own dress.

‘They say Zoica goes to war!’ said Maid Francer.

‘Like in the old times, like in the Trade War!’ Maid Wholt added, pulling on a bodice string.

‘I have been educated by the best tutors in the hive. I know about the Trade War. It was the most bloody and production-costly event in hive history! Why do you giggle about it?’

The maids curtseyed and backed away from Merity.

‘Soldiers!’ Maid Wholt sniggered.

‘Handsome and hungry, coming here!’ squealed Maid Francer.

‘Shut up, both of you!’ Merity ordered. She pulled her muslin fichu around her shoulders and fastened the pin. Then she picked up her credit wand from the top of the rosewood credenza. Though the wand was a tool that gave her access to her personal expense account in the House Chass treasury, it was ornamental in design, a delicate lace fan which she flipped open and waved in front of her face as the built-in ioniser hummed.

The maids looked down, stifling enthusiastic giggles.

‘Where is the gown maker?’

‘Hiding in the next room, under his desk,’ Francer said.

‘I said you’d require transportation to be summoned, but he refuses to come out,’ Wholt added.

‘Then this establishment will no longer enjoy the custom of Noble House Chass. We will find our own transport,’ Merity said. Head high, she led her giggling maids out of the thickly carpeted gown-hall, through drapes that drew back automatically at their approach and out into the perfumed elegance of the Promenade.

Gol Kolea put down his axe-rake and pulled off his head-lamp. His hands were bloody and sore. The air was black with rock-soot, like fog. Gol sucked a mouthful of electrolyte fluid from his drinking pipe and refastened it to his collar.

‘What is that noise?’ he asked Trug Vereas.

Trug shrugged. ‘Sounds like an alarm, up there somewhere.’ The work face of Number Seventeen Deep Working was way below the conduits and mine-head wheels of the mighty ore district. Gol and Trug were sixteen hundred metres underground.

Another work gang passed them, also looking up and speaking in low voices.

‘Some kind of exercise?’

‘Must be,’ Trug said. He and Gol stepped aside as a laden string of ore-carts loaded with loose conglomerate rattled by along the greasy mono-track. Somewhere nearby, a rock-drill began to chatter.

‘Okay…’ Gol raised his tool and paused. ‘I worry about Livy.’

‘She’ll be fine. Trust me. And we’ve got a quota to fill.’

Gol swung his axe-rake and dug in. He just wished the scrape and crack of his blade would drown out the distant sirens.

Captain Ban Daur paused to button his double-breasted uniform coat and pull the leather harness into place. He forced his mind to be calm. As an officer, he would have been informed of any drill and usually he got wind even of surprise practices. But this was real. He could feel it.

He picked up his gloves and his spiked helmet and left his quarters. The corridors of the Hass West wall-fort were bustling with troop details. All wore the blue cloth uniform and spiked helmets of the Vervun Primary, the city’s standing army. Five hundred thousand troops all told, plus another 70,000 auxiliaries and armour crews, a mighty force that manned the Curtain Wall and the wall forts of Vervunhive. The regiment had a noble heritage and had proved itself in the Trade War, from which time they had been maintained as a permanent institution. When foundings were ordered for the Imperial Guard, Vervunhive raised them from its forty billion-plus population. The men of Vervun Primary were never touched or transferred. It was a life-duty, a career. But though their predecessors had fought bravely, none of the men currently composing the ranks of Vervun Primary had ever seen combat.

Daur barked out a few commands to calm the commotion in the hallway. He was young, only twenty-three, but tall and cleanly handsome, from a good mid-Spine family and the men liked him. They seemed to relax a little, seeing him so calm. Not that he felt calm.

‘Alert duty stations,’ Daur told them. ‘You there! Where’s your weapon?’

The trooper shrugged. ‘Came running when I heard the– Forgot it… sir…’

‘Go back and get it, you dumb gak! Three days’ discipline duty – after this is over.’

The soldier ran off.

‘Now!’ cried Daur. ‘Let’s pretend we’ve actually been trained, shall we? Every man of you knows where he should be and what he should be doing, so go! In the hallowed name of the Emperor and in the service of the beloved hive!’

Daur headed uptower, pulling out his autopistol and checking its clip.

Corporal Bendace met him on the steps. Bendace had a data-slate in one hand and a pathetic moustache on his upper lip.

‘Told you to shave that off,’ Daur said, taking the slate and looking at it.

‘I think it’s… dashing,’ Bendace said soulfully, stroking it.

Daur ignored him, reading the slate. They hurried up the tower as troopers double-timed down. On a landing, they passed a corporal tossing autoguns from a wall rack to a line of waiting men.

‘So?’ asked Bendace as they started up the final flight to the fort-top.

‘You know those rumours you heard? About Zoica going for another Trade War?’

‘That confirms it?’

Daur pushed the slate back into Bendace’s hands with a sour look. ‘No. It doesn’t say anything. It’s just a deployment order from House Command in the Spine. All units are to take position, protocol gamma sigma. Wall and fort weapons to be raised.’

‘It says that?’

‘No, I’m making it up. Yes, it says that. Weapons raised, but not armed, until further House Command notice.’

‘This is bad, isn’t it?’

Daur shrugged. ‘Define “bad”?’

Bendace paused. ‘I–’

‘Bad is your facial growth. I don’t know what this is.’

They stepped out onto the windy battlements. Gun crews were raising the trio of anti-air batteries into position, hydraulic pistons heaving the weapon mounts up from shuttered hardpoints in the tower top. Autoloader carriages were being wheeled out from the lift-heads. Other troops had taken up position in the netted stub-nests. Cries and commands flew back and forth.

Daur crossed to the ramparts and looked around. At his back, the vast, smoke-hazed shape of the Main Spine itself rose into the sombre sky like a granite peak, winking with a million lights. To his right lay the glitter of the River Hass and the grimy shapes of the docks and outer habs on the far bank. Below him, the sweeping curve of the vast adamantine Curtain Wall curved away east to the smoke pall of the ore smelteries and the dark mass of the Spoil hunkered twenty-five kilometres further round the circumference of the city skirts.

To the south, the slum-growths of the outer habs outside the wall, the dark wheel-heads and gantries of the vast mining district, and the marching viaducts of the main southern rail link extended far away. Beyond the extremities of the hive, the grasslands, a sullen, dingy green, reached to the horizon. Visibility was medium. Haze shimmered the distance. Daur cranked a tripod-mounted scope around, staring out. Nothing. A pale, green, unresolvable nothing.

He stood back and looked around the ramparts. One of the anti-air batteries on the wall-top below was only half raised and troopers were cursing and fighting to free the lift hydraulics. Other than that, everything and everyone was in place.

The captain took up the handset of the vox-unit carried by a waiting trooper.

‘Daur to all Hass West area positions. Reel it off.’

The junior officers sang over the link with quick discipline. Daur felt genuine pride. Those in his command had executed gamma sigma in a little under twelve minutes. The fort and the western portion of the wall bristled with ready weapons and readier men.

He glanced down. The final, recalcitrant anti-aircraft battery rose into place. The crew gave a brief cheer that the wind stole away, then pushed the autoloader-cart in to mate with it.

Daur selected a new channel.

‘Daur, Hass West, to House Command. We are deployed. We await your orders.’

In the vast Square of Marshals, just inside the Curtain Wall, adjacent to the Heironymo Sondar Gate, the air shook with the thunder of three hundred tank engines. Huge Leman Russ war-machines, painted in the blue livery of Vervun Primary, revved at idle in rows across the square. More vehicles clanked and ground their way in at the back of the square, from the marshalling sheds behind the South-Hive barracks.

General Vegolain of the First Primary Armoured, jumped down from his mount, buckling on his leather head-shield, and approached the commissar. Vegolain saluted, snapping his jack-booted heels together.

‘Commissar Kowle!’

‘General,’ Kowle replied. He had just arrived in the square by staff limousine, a sinister black vehicle that was now pulling away behind its motorbike escorts. There were two other commissars with him: Langana and the cadet Fosker.

Kowle was a tall, lean man who looked as if he had been forced to wear the black cap and longcoat of an Imperial commissar. His skin was sallow and taut, and his eyes were a disturbing beige.

Unlike Langana and Fosker, Kowle was an off-worlder. The senior commissar was Imperial Guard, seconded to watch over the Vervunhive standing army as a concession to its continued maintenance. Kowle quietly despised his post. His promising career with the Fadayhin Fifth had foundered some years before and against his will he had been posted to wet-nurse this toy army. Now, at last, he tasted the possibility of acquiring some glory that might rejuvenate his lustreless career.

Langana and Fosker were hive-bred, both from aspiring houses. Their uniform showed their difference from Kowle. In place of his Imperial double-eagle pins, they wore the axe-rake symbol of the VPHC, the Vervun Primary Hive Commissariat, the disciplinary arm of the standing army. The Sondar nobility was keen on discipline. Some even said that the VPHC was almost a secret police force, acting beyond the reach of the Administratum, in the interests of the ruling house.

‘We have orders, commissar?’

Kowle scratched his nose absently and nodded. He handed Vegolain a data-slate.

‘We are to form up at company strength and head out into the grasslands. I have not been told why.’

‘I presume it is Zoica, commissar. They wish to spar with us again and–’

‘Are you privy to the inter-hive policies of Zoica?’ Kowle snapped.

‘No, comm–’

‘Do you then believe that rumour and dissent is a tool of control?’

‘No, I–’

‘Until we are told it is Zoica, it is no one. Is that clear?’

‘Commissar. Will… will you be accompanying us?’

Kowle didn’t reply. He marched across to Vegolain’s Leman Russ and clambered aboard.

Three minutes later, the Sondar Gate opened with a great shriek of hydraulic compressors and the armoured column poured out onto the main south highway in triple file.

‘Who has ordered this alarm?’ The question came from three mouths at once, dull, electronic, emotionless.

Marshal Gnide, strategic commander of Vervun Primary and chief military officer of Vervunhive, paused before replying. It was difficult to know which face to answer.

‘Who?’ the voices repeated.

Gnide stood in the softly lit, warm audience hall of the Imperial House Sondar, at the very summit of the Main Spine. He wished he’d taken off his blue, floor-length, braid-trimmed greatcoat before entering. His plumed cap was heavy and itched his brow.

‘It is necessary, High One.’

The three servitors, limp and supported only by the wires and leads that descended from the ceiling trackways, circled him. One was a thin, androgynous boy with dye-stained skin. Another was a voluptuous girl, naked and branded with golden runes. The third was a chubby cherub, a toy harp in its pudgy hands, swan-wings sutured to its back. All of them lolled on their tubes and strings, blank-eyed.

Servos whined and the girl swung closer to Gnide, her limp feet trailing on the tiled floor.

‘Are you my loyal marshal?’ she asked, in that same flat monotone, that voice that wasn’t hers.

Gnide ignored her, looking past the meat puppet – as he called it – to the ornamental iron tank in the far corner of the room. The metal of the tank was dark and tarnished with startlingly green rust. A single round porthole looked out like a cataract-glazed eye.

‘You know I am, High One.’

‘Then why this disobedience?’ the youth asked, atrophied limbs trembling as the strings and leads swung him round.

‘This is not disobedience, High One. This is duty. And I will not speak to your puppets. I asked for audience with House Ruler Salvador Sondar himself.’

The cherub swung abruptly round into Gnide’s face. Sub-dermal tensors pulled its bloated mouth into a grin that was utterly unmatched by its dead eyes.

‘They are me and I am them! You will address me through them!’

Gnide pushed the dangling cherub aside, flinching at the touch of its pallid flesh on his hand. He stalked up the low steps to the iron tank and stared into the lens port.

‘Zoica mobilises against us, High One! A new Trade War is upon us! Orbital scans show this to be true!’

‘It is not called Zoica,’ the girl said from behind him. ‘Use its name.’

Gnide sighed. ‘Ferrozoica Hive Manufactory,’ he said.

‘At last, some respect,’ rattled the cherub, bobbing around Gnide. ‘Our old foes, now our most worthy trading partners. They are our brethren, our fellow trade-hive. We do not raise arms against them.’

‘With respect!’ snapped Gnide. ‘Zoica has always been our foe, our rival. There were times last century they bettered us in output.’

‘That was before House Sondar took the High Place here. Vervunhive is the greatest of all, now and ever after.’ The youth-puppet began to drool slackly as it spoke.

‘All Vervunhive rejoices that House Sondar has led us to domination. But the Legislature of the Noble houses has voted this hour that we should prepare for war. That is why the alarms were sounded.’

‘Without me?’ the girl hissed, flatly.

‘As it is written, according to the customs, we signalled you. You did not reply. Mandate 347gf, as ratified by your illustrious predecessor, Heironymo, gives us authority to act.’

‘You would use old laws to unseat me?’ asked the cherub, clattering round on its strings to stare into Gnide’s face with dead eyes.

‘This is not usurpation, High One. Vervunhive is in danger. Look!’ Gnide reached forward and pressed a data-slate against the lens of the tank.

‘See what the orbitals tell us! Months of silence from Zoica, signs of them preparing for war! Rumours, hearsay – why weren’t we told the truth? Why does this spring down on us so late in the day? Didn’t you know? You, all-seeing, all-knowing High One? Or did you just decide not to tell us?’

The puppets began to thrash and jiggle, knocking into Gnide. He pushed them off.

‘I have been in constant dialogue with my counterpart in Ferrozoica Hive Manufactory. We have come to enjoy the link, the companionship. His Highness Clatch of House Clatch is a dear friend. He would not deceive me. The musterings along the Ferrozoica ramparts were made because of the crusade. Warmaster Slaydo leads his legions into our spatial territories; the foul enemy is resisting. It is a precaution.’

‘Slaydo is dead, High One. Five years cold on Balhaut. Macaroth is the leader of the crusade now. The beloved Guard legions are sweeping the Sabbat Worlds clean of Chaos scum. We rejoice daily that our world, beloved Verghast, was not touched.’

‘Slaydo is dead?’ the three voices asked as one.

‘Yes, High One. Now, with respect, I ask that we may test-start the Shield. If Zoica is massing to conquer us, we must be ready.’

‘No! You undermine me! The Shield cannot be raised without my permission! Zoica does not threaten! Clatch is our friend! Slaydo is not dead!’

The three voices rose in a shrill chorus, the meat puppets quivering with unknowable rage.

‘You would not have treated Heironymo with such disrespect!’

‘Your brother, great one as he was, did not hide in an Awareness Tank and talk through dead servitors… High One.’

‘I forbid it!’

Gnide pulled a glittering ducal seal from his coat. ‘The Legislature expected this. I am empowered by the houses of Vervunhive, in expediency, to revoke your powers as per the Act of Entitlement, 45jk. The Legislature commends your leadership, but humbly entreats you that it is now taking executive action.’ Gnide pushed the puppets aside and crossed to a brass console in the far wall. He pressed the centre of the seal and data-limbs extended like callipers from the rosette with a machined click. Gnide set it in the lock and turned it.

The console flashed into life, chattering runes and sigils scrolling down the glass plate.

‘No!’ screeched the three voices. ‘This is insubordination! I am Vervunhive! I am Vervunhive!’

‘You are dethroned for the good of the city,’ Gnide snapped. He pressed the switches in series, activating the power generators deep beneath the hive. He entered the sequences that would engage the main transmission pylon and bring the Shield online.

The cherub flew at him. He batted it away and it upturned, tangling in its cords. Gnide punched in the last sequence and reached for the activation lever.

He gasped and fell back, reaching behind him. The girl puppet jerked away, a long blade wedged in her dead hands. The blade was dark with blood.

Gnide tried to close the gouting wound in his lower back. His knees gave and he fell. The girl swung in again and stuck the blade through his throat.

He fell, face down, soaking the carpet with his pumping blood.

‘I am Vervunhive,’ the girl said. The cherub and youth repeated it, dull and toneless.

Inside the iron tank, bathed in warm ichor and floating free, every organ and vessel connected by tubes to the life-bank, Salvador Sondar, High Master of Vervunhive… dreamed.

The salt grasses were ablaze. All along the scarp rise, Vervun Primary tanks were buckled and broken amid the rippling, grey grass, fire spilling out of them. The air was toxic with smoke.

Commissar Kowle dropped clear of the command tank as flames within consumed the shrieking Vegolain and his crew. Kowle’s coat was on fire. He shed it.

Enemy fire pummelled down out of the smoke-black air. A Vervun tank a hundred metres away exploded and sent shockwaves of whickering shrapnel in all directions.

One shard grazed Kowle’s temple and dropped him.

He got up again. Crews were bailing from burning tanks, some on fire, some trying to help their blazing fellows. Others ran.

Kowle walked back through the line of decimated hive armour, smelling the salt grass as it burned, thick and rancid in his nose.

He pulled out his pistol.

‘Where is your courage?’ he asked a tank gunner as he put a round through his head.

‘Where is your strength?’ he inquired of two loaders fleeing up the slope, as he shot them both.

He put his muzzle to the head of a screaming, half-burned tank captain and blew out his brains. ‘Where is your conviction?’ Kowle asked.

He swung round and pointed his pistol at a group of tank crewmen who were stumbling up the grassy rise towards him from their exploded tank.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing? This is war. Do you run from it?’

They hesitated. Kowle shot one through the head to show he meant business.

‘Turn! Face the foe!’

The remaining crewmen turned and fled towards the enemy positions. A tank round took them all apart a second later.

Missiles strafed in from the low, cloudlike meteorites and sundered twenty more tanks along the Vervun formation. The explosions were impossibly loud. Kowle was thrown flat in the grass.

He heard the clanking as he rolled over. On the far rise, battletanks and gun platforms painted in the ochre livery of Zoica rolled down towards him.

A thousand or more.

Out of nowhere, just before nightfall, about a half-hour after the klaxons had stopped yelping, the first shells fell, unexpected, hurled by long-range guns beyond the horizon.

Two fell short on the southern outer habs, kicking up plumes of wreckage from the worker homes.

Another six dented the Curtain Wall.

At Hass West, Daur yelled to his men and cranked the guns around. A target… give me a target… he prayed.

Dug-in Zoica armour and artillery, hidden out in the burning grasslands, found their range. Shells began to drop into the hive itself.

A gigantic salvo hit the railhead at Veyveyr Gate and set it ablaze. Several more bracketed the Vervun Primary barracks and atomised over a thousand troopers waiting for deployment.

Another scatter pounded the northern habs along the river. Derricks and quays exploded and shattered into the water. In mid-stream, Folik’s over-laden ferry was showered with burning debris. Folik tried to turn in the current, yelling for Mincer. Another shell fell in the water nearby, drenching the screaming passengers with stinking river water. The ferry wallowed in the blast-wake.

Two more dropped beyond the Magnificat, exploding and sinking the ferry Inscrutable, which was crossing back over the tideway. The Inscrutable went up in a shockwave that peppered the water with debris. Diesel slicks burned on the choppy surface.

Folik pulled his wheel around and steered out into mid-channel. Mincer was screaming something at him, but the wail of shells drowned him out.

A staggered salvo rippled through the mining district, flattening wheel heads and pulley towers.

Deep below the earth, Gol Kolea tried to dig Trug Vereas out of the rock fall that had cascaded down the main lift chute of Number Seventeen Deep Working. All around, miners were screaming and dying.

Trug was dead, his head mashed.

Gol pulled back, his hands slick with his friend’s blood. Lift cables whipped back down the shaft as cages smashed and fell. The central access had collapsed in on them.

‘Livy!’ he screamed up into the abyss. ‘Livy!’

Vor was obliterated by the first shell that came through the roof of Vervun Smeltery One. Agun Soric was thrown flat and a chip of ore flying from the blistering shock took out his left eye forever.

Blood from cuts to the scalp streamed down his face. He rolled over in the wreckage and then was lifted off the floor by another impact that exploded the main conveyor. A piece of oily bracket, whizzing supersonically across the work-floor, decapitated one of the screaming workers nearby and embedded itself in the meat of Soric’s thigh. He howled, but his cry was lost in the tumult and the klaxons as they started again.

Livy Kolea looked around as the glass roof of the transit station fell in explosively and she tried to shield Yoncy and Dalin.

Glass shrapnel ripped her to pieces, her and another sixty civilians. The aftershock of hot air crisped the rest. Dalin was behind a pillar and remained miraculously unscathed. He got up, crunching over the broken glass, calling for his mother.

When he found what was left of her, he fell silent, too stunned for noise.

Tona Criid took him up in her arms.

‘S’okay, kid. S’okay.’ She pulled over the upturned cart and saw the healthy, beaming face of the baby smiling back at her. Tona took up the infant under one arm and dragged the boy behind her.

They were twenty metres from the south atrium when further shells levelled carriage station C4/a.

Menx and Troor escorted Guilder Worlin through the chaos of the Commercia. Several barter-houses to their west were ablaze and smoke clogged the marketways. The closest carriage station with links to the Main Spine was C4/a, but there was a vast smoke plume in that direction. Menx redirected their route through the abandoned Guild Fayk barter-house and headed instead for C7/d.

By the time they reached the funicular railway depot, Guilder Worlin was crying with rage. The bodyguard thought it was for fear of his life, but Worlin was despairing for purely mercantile reasons. Guild Worlin had no holdings in weaponshops, medical supplies, or food sources. War was on them and they had no suitable holdings to exploit.

They entered the carriage station, but the place was deserted. A few abandoned possessions – purse-bags, pict-slates and the like – were scattered on the platform. The transit indicator plate overhead was blank.

‘I want,’ Worlin hissed through clenched teeth, ‘to return to the Main Spine now. I want to be in the family house, to be inside the Spine hull. Now!’

Troor looked down the monotrack and turned back. ‘I see lights, sir. A transit approaches.’

The carriage train pulled into the station and stopped on automatic for a moment. The twin cars were packed full of Low- and Mid-Spine citizens.

‘Let me in!’ Worlin banged on the nearest door-hatch. Terrified faces looked out at him silently.

Shells walloped into the Commercia behind him. Worlin pulled out his needle pistol and opened fire through the glass. The passengers, trapped like rats in a cage, screamed as they were slaughtered.

After a brief hesitation, Worlin’s bodyguard joined him, slaughtering twenty or more with their unshrouded guns. Others fled the carriage, screaming. Pulling out bodies, the guards hauled Worlin into the carriage, just as the automatic rest period finished and the transit resumed. It engaged on the cog-track and slowly began to crank up into the hull of the main Spine.

‘House Sondar, deliver us from evil,’ hissed Worlin, sitting down on a gilt bench seat and rearranging his robes. Menx and Troor stood nearby, uneasy and unnerved.

Worlin gazed out of the window of the rising transit, apparently not seeing the smoke blooms and fireballs rising across the city below – just as he didn’t seem to see the pools of blood that washed around his shoes.

Volleys of shells and long-range missiles pounded into the southern face of the Main Spine. Despite the thick adamantine and ceramite sheath, some even punctured the skin of the great structure. A glassmaker’s showrooms on the Mid-Spine Promenade took a direct hit and blew out, filling the air with whizzing splinters of lead-crystal and ceramite wall debris. Fifty house ordinary nobles and their retainers were shredded or burnt as they hurried in panic down the plush walkways.

Just a few steps beyond the glassmaker’s, shielded from the out-blast by a row of pillars, Merity Chass continued to stride on, her weeping maids huddled behind her.

‘This is not happening,’ Merity Chass told herself. ‘This is not happening.’

Multiple shell hits lit up the Curtain Wall around Hass West. An anti-aircraft post, the one that had been slow rising from its pit, was blown away and its ignited munitions tore a bite out of the wall.

Captain Daur traversed his guns and looked for an enemy. The grasslands were blank. Long-range weapons were reaching them, utterly beyond their power to resist.

If they even had the authority.

‘Captain Daur to Marshal Gnide! Give us permission to arm! Give the order! Marshal, I’m begging you!’

In the dull quiet of the audience chamber, Gnide’s corpse was lifted away from the carpet by the slack puppets. The desperate voice of Daur and hundreds of other field commanders bayed unheard from his vox-plug.

Three shells hit Hass West Fort in series. The first ignited the battery munitions. The second vaporised Corporal Bendace and sixteen other troopers. The third, a crippling shockwave, splintered the tower top and caused a vast chunk of rampart to slump away in a torrent of stone, dust and fire. Captain Daur fell with it, caught in the avalanche of rockcrete and ceramite. He had still not received the order to arm from the House Command.

In the Iron Tank, Salvador Sondar, High Master of Vervunhive, drifted and dreamed. The satisfaction he had gained from asserting his mastery over that fool Gnide was ebbing. There was something akin to pain creeping into him across the mind-impulse links that hooked his cortex into the data-tides and production autoledgers of the hive. He rolled over in the warm suspension fluid and accessed the information currents of the Legislature and the guilds. The hive was… under attack.

He retuned his link to confirm. Even when the information was verified, it seemed wrong. There was a discrepancy that his mind could not resolve. Vervunhive was attacked. Yet this should not be.

He needed time to think.

Petulantly, he activated the Shield generators.

Two

An Ochre Wave

‘Be it one man or one million, the enemy of the Imperium must be treated the same and denied with all diligence.’

— Pius Kowle, Imperial commissar, from his public education leaflets

Dusk came early at the end of the first day. The darkening sky was stained darker still by the smoke plumes rising from the hive and its outer districts, and by the great ashen pall looming over the salt grasslands to the south. Thick, fire-swollen, black smoke boiled up from the mining district and the heavy industrial suburbs south of the Curtain Wall, and a murky brown flare of burning fuel rose from ruptured tanks and silos on the Hass docks to the north of the river. Other threads of white, grey and mauve smoke rose from hundreds of smaller, individual fires.

The bombardment continued, even though the Shield had been raised. A vast, translucent umbrella of field-energy extended out from the great Shield Pylon in the central district and unfurled itself in a dome that reached down to anchor substations inside the Curtain Wall. Thousands of shells and missiles burst against it every minute, dimpling the cloudy energy and making it ripple and wobble like green gelatine. From inside the Shield, it looked as if the green sky was blossoming with fire.

Observers on the southern wall, most of them soldiers of Vervun Primary, trained their scopes and magnoculars through the rising smoke and fires in the outer habs and saw the distant grass horizon flickering with a wall of flame seventy kilometres wide. The grass smoke – ash-grey but streaked with black from individual infernos down below the skyline – tarnished the southern sky in the dying light. Bright, brief flashes underlit the horizon smoke, hinting at the fierce armour battle taking place just out of sight. No communications had been received from General Vegolain’s armoured column for two hours.

Now that the Shield was up to cover the main hive, the outer habs, the heavy industry sectors and the mining district south of the wall were taking the worst of it. Unprotected, they were raked mercilessly by long-range artillery, siege mortars and incendiary rockets. As the light faded, the southern out-hive suburb became a dark, mangled mass, busy with thousands of fires, drizzled by fresh rains of explosives. From the Wall, it was possible to see the shock waves radiating from each major strike, gusting the existing fires.

The population of the southern outer habs was in the order of nine million, plus another six million workers who dwelt in the main hive but travelled out to work the industrial district and the mines. They had little shelter. Some hid in cellars or underground storage bays and many died entombed in these places. Penetrator shells dug them out explosively like rats, opening the makeshift shelters to the sky. Others were sealed forever under thousands of tonnes of collapsed masonry.

There were a few deep-seated, hardpoint shelters in the southern habs, reserved for suburban officials and minor area legislators. These shelters had been dug ninety years before during the Trade War and few were in decent working order. One group of hab officials spent two hours trying to find the correct rune-code to let them into their assigned shelter and they were incinerated by a rocket before they could get the vault door open. Another group, a few blocks north, found themselves fighting off a terrified mob that wanted to gain access to a shelter too. A VPHC officer, leading the group, opened fire with his handgun to drive the frantic citizens away while the ranking official, a mill-boss with guild connections, opened the vault.

They sealed themselves in, twenty-three rank-privileged citizens of authority level three or less, in a bunker emplacement designed to shelter two hundred. They all died of suffocation by the following dawn. The air systems, long in need of overhaul and regular maintenance, failed the moment they were switched on.

By nightfall, millions of refugees were clogging the main arterial routes into the hive, bottled up at Sondar Gate, at the Hass West road entry and the ore works cargo route. They were even trying to gain access via the rail-link tunnel at Veyveyr Gate, but the terminal inside had been turned into an inferno in the first wave of bombing and the gate was blocked.

Others still, in desperate, slowly moving lines, many laden with possessions or injured family members, dared the Spoil and the mud flats, and some made it in through the as-yet-undamaged railhead at Croe Gate.

The Hass West Fort was still burning and the top of it was cascading debris down both inside and outside the Wall. However, the Wall and the Hass Gate itself were still firm and streams of refugees made it into the hive via the Hass Road under supervision of Vervun Primary troopers manning the damaged emplacement. But access was still slow and a column of people, two kilometres long and growing, tailed back from the Hass Gate into the dark, vulnerable to the ceaseless onslaught pummelling the outer habs. Thousands died before they could pass into shelter, as shells landed in the thick queue. Just as many, perhaps eight or nine thousand, fled the traffic stream northwest and made progress into the river shores.

The last kinking stretch of shield wall north of Hass West Fort, known as the Dock Wall, reached out into the mid-waters and there was no way through. Some perished in the treacherous mud-flats; others tried to swim the Hass itself and were lost by the hundreds. Most cowered in the stinking slime under the dock wall, wailing plaintively up at the soldiers two hundred metres above them on the wall top, men who could do nothing to help them. Almost two thousand people remained penned in that filthy corner of the Wall through the first days of the conflict, too afraid to try the route back round the wall to Hass Gate. Starvation, disease and despair killed them all within four days.

The Sondar Gate was open and the main tide of refugees sought entry there. The Vervun Primary troops, focussed en masse to control the crowd, admitted the people as quickly as possible, but it was miserably slow going and the column of people stretched three kilometres back into the burning outer habs.

Many of the tail-enders, certain they would be dead before ever reaching the safety of the hive’s Shield, turned around and headed out into the salt grasslands by the hundreds. None were ever seen alive again.

In the Square of Marshals, just inside the Heironymo Sondar Gate, the hive troopers struggled to manage the overwhelming influx of citizens. Forty per cent of the arrivals were injured.

Captain Letro Cargin had been given charge of the operation and inside an hour he was close to despair. He had first tried to contain the refugees in the vast ceremonial square itself, but it quickly became filled to overflowing. Some family groups were climbing the pedestals of the statues around the square to find somewhere to crouch. There was group singing: work anthems of the hive or Imperial hymns. The massed, frail voices – set against the constant thunder of the bombardment and the crackle of the Shield above – unnerved his men.

The Vervun Primary barracks north-west of the square, which had taken hits in the first stage of the attack, was still blazing but under control. Cargin voxed House Command repeatedly until he was granted special permission from the guilds to open the Anko Chemical Plant west of the square and the guild manufactories to the east, to house the overspill. Quickly, these new areas became overfilled too. The guilds had issued particular instructions as to how much of those areas could be used or even entered. Cargin’s men reported fights breaking out as they tried to deny access to certain areas. Shots were fired over the heads of the crowd. Compared to the onslaught they had weathered outside, the small arms of the troops were insignificant and the House Guard found themselves pushed back deeper into the industrial areas, trying to accommodate the intake. Most troopers were profoundly unwilling to shoot at their own citizens. In one instance, an angry junior officer actually fired into the encroaching crowd, killing two. He and his six-man squad were torn apart by a pack of smoke-blackened textile workers.

Cargin voxed frantically for supplies and advice. By eight in the evening, new orders were being issued from House Command and the Legislature, designating refugee assembly areas, hastily arranged in the inner worker habs south of the Pylon and the Commercia. Asylum traffic from the Sondar Gate, Hass Gate and, to a lesser extent, the Croe Gate was now choking the southern sectors of the hive. Some of the House Legislature, meeting in extraordinary session in the Main Spine, argued that it was the hive’s duty to house the outer hab population. Others were simply afraid that with the main southern arterials choked, they would never be able to mobilise their armies. Six noble houses also volunteered aid, which began to be shipped by carriage route down to the Square of Marshals and the main city landing field where the refugees from Hass Gate were also congregating.

It was a start, but not enough. Cargin began to wonder if the upper echelon of the hive really understood the scale of the problem. The Imperial mottoes, hive slogans and other messages of calming propaganda flashing up on the public-address plates did little to deaden the general panic. Cargin had angry, frightened citizens by the thousands, most stone-deaf from concussion shock, many burned naked by the blasts, many more dying and stretcher-bound. Short of closing the Gate itself, he had no way to stem the flow. His three thousand men were vastly outnumbered by the mass.

Cargin was voxed to the north corner of the square. There he found a field station had been set up by medics from some inner hab infirmary. Hundreds of the injured had been laid out on the stone paving. Doctors and orderlies dressed in crimson gowns and masks tended to them.

‘Are you Cargin?’

Cargin looked round. A gowned and masked figure was addressing him. She pulled off her mask to reveal an appealing, heart-shaped face. The eyes, though, were hard and bewildered.

‘Yes… doctor?’

‘Surgeon Ana Curth, Inner Hab Collective Medical Hall 67/mv. I’ve been given authority here. We are trying to set up a triage station under the carriage stands over there, but the flow is too great.’

‘I’m doing my best, surgeon,’ he said flatly. He could see tractor units and trucks lining the barrack road, headlamps blazing and engines gunning, moving in to transport those in need of immediate surgery to the main infirmary facilities in the inner habs and Low Spine.

‘Likewise,’ said Curth without humour. The air smelled of blood and burned flesh and was full of piteous shrieking. ‘The medical halls are already full of wounded from the inner city. There were huge casualties from the start of the raid, before the Shield was ignited.’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Cargin shrugged. ‘I’ve followed my orders and allowed the incoming to flow out of the square into adjacent areas. There seems to be no end to them. My observers on the wall-top say the queue outside is still three kilometres long.’

The surgeon looked at the blood-spattered paving for a moment, her hands on her hips. ‘I…’ she began, then paused. ‘Can you get me a vox link? I’ll try sending to my superiors. The Commercia has been evacuated and there is vast floorspace inside it. I doubt they’ll grant permission, but I’ll do what I can.’

Cargin nodded. He called his vox-officer over and told him to attend the surgeon. ‘Whatever you can do is better than nothing,’ he told her.

The tank roared and bounced over the trampled grass hillocks, heading north at full throttle, its turret reversed to spit shells into the firefields behind it, into the invisible enemy at its heels.

The night sky was ablaze. Scorching trails of rockets and shrieking shells tore overhead, heading for the hive.

Commissar Kowle crouched in the turret of the running tank, shouting orders to fire to the gun-crew in the lit space below him. The vox-link was down. He couldn’t reach House Command. He had forty-two tanks left out of the armoured column of more than four hundred and fifty that had left the Sondar Gate that afternoon. No ranking Vervun Primary armour officer was left alive. Cadet Fosker was also dead.

Kowle had command now. Using the VPHC Commissar Langana as his second officer, he had managed to regroup the shattered remnants of the tank force and swing it back towards the city. It felt like retreat, but Kowle knew it was a sound tactical decision. They were facing an ochre wave out there on the grass-flats, a stupendous Zoica armoured front, pushing in through three salients. Only in his days with the Imperial Guard, during major offensives like Balhaut and Cociaminus, had he seen anything like this scale of assault. And there were infantry regiments behind, thick like locusts, following the armour.

Kowle didn’t even want to think about the size of the opposition just now. It was… unbelievable. It was impossible. An ochre wave – that’s all he could see, the tide of ochre-painted machines rolling over his forces, crushing them.

He tried the vox again, but the enemy was jamming all bands. Shells rained down amongst the retreating Vervun tanks. At least two blew out as munitions ignited, sending tank hulls end-over-end in fireballs, spraying track segments out like shattered teeth.

The driver was calling him over the intercom. ‘Ahead, sir!’

Kowle swivelled round. Vervunhive was in sight now, the great luminous blister of green energy flickering on the skyline like a giant mushroom cloud, glowing in the night. Kowle grabbed his scope and saw the blackened, burning mass of the outer habs fast approaching. A persistent rain of explosives was still dropping into them.

‘Kowle to column!’ he spat into his inter-tank vox. ‘Form up and follow me in down the Southern Highway. We will re-enter the city through the Sondar Gate. Let none shirk, for I will find them wanting and find them!’

He smiled at his last words. Even now, under a storm of fire, he could still turn a good, disciplinarian phrase.

The high-ceilinged, gilt-ornamented Hall of the Legislature, high and secure in the upper sections of the Main Spine, was full of arguing voices.

Lord Heymlik Chass, noble patriarch of House Chass, sat back in his velvet-upholstered bench and glanced aside to his aides and chamberlains.

The Legislature was full tonight. All nine noble houses were in attendance, as well as the representatives of the other twenty-one houses ordinary, along with the drones of over three hundred guild associations and families in their flamboyant finery. And down in the commons pit, hundreds of habitat and work-clave representatives bayed for action.

As a scion of a noble house, Chass’s bench was in the inner circle, just above the Legislator’s dais. Vox/pict drones mumbled and hovered along the benches like bumblebees. The Legislature Choir, told to shut up some minutes before by Noble Croe, sat sullenly in their balcony, balling up pages of sheet music and throwing them down on the assembly beneath. Master Jehnik, of House Ordinary Jehnik, was on his feet in the middle circle, reading from a prepared slate and trying to get someone to listen to his fifty-five-point plan.

Chass pressed the geno-reader on the side of his hardwood stall and the plate slid open before him.

He keyed in his authority rating, touched the statement runes and wrote: Master Legislator, are we going to debate or simply argue all night?

The words flashed up on the central plate and six other noble houses, fifteen houses ordinary and the majority of the guild associations assented.

Silence fell.

The Master Legislator, Anophy, an ancient hunchback with a tricorn, ribboned hat, crawled to his feet from his dais throne and began the Litany of Enfranchisement. The assembly was quiet as it was intoned. Anophy stroked his long, silver moustache, smoothed the front of his opalescent robe and asked the assembly for points of order.

Around seventy holographic runes lit the plate display and glowed overhead via hovering repeater screens.

‘Noble Anko has the floor.’ There were moans from the commons pit.

Anko got up, or rather was helped up by his entourage. His raspy, vox-amplified voice rang around the hall.

‘I deplore the attack on our city-hive by our erstwhile friends of Zoica. I press to vote we deny them and send them home, tails between their legs.’

No argument there, thought Chass. Typical Anko, going for the easy vote.

Anko went on. ‘I wish the Legislature to back me on another matter. My plant is being overrun by indigents from the suburbs. House officers tell me that the plant is already overwhelmed and immediate production will be impossible. This hurts Vervunhive. I move that House Anko be allowed to eject the indigents from its premises.’

More squabbling and yelling from below.

‘Noble Yetch?’

‘Are we to disabuse our work population so, cousin Anko? You like them well enough when they raise your quotas. Do you hate them now they choke your factories?’

Commotion, louder than before. Several nobles and many guilders thumped their assent sirens vigorously. Anko sat down, his expression vile.

‘Noble Chass?’

Chass rose. ‘I fear my cousin Anko fails to read the larger story here. Ninety years have passed since we faced such a crisis. We face a Second Trade War. Reports are that the wave of enemy force is quite humbling to our own defences. We have all seen how the tumult today has wounded our hive. Why, my own dear daughter barely reached home alive.’

Sympathetic holograms flashed sycophantically from the tiers of some of the houses ordinary.

Chass continued. ‘If this attack inconveniences our houses, I say: Let us be inconvenienced! We have a duty to the hive population and cousin Anko should put that bald fact before his production quota. I wish to frame more important questions to this Legislature. One: Why did this attack come as a surprise? Two: Should we signal the Imperium for assistance? Three: Where is the High Master, what did he know of this and why was the Shield ignited so late?’

Now the roaring grew. Assent sigils lit up all around. The Legislator screamed for order.

‘Noble Chass,’ a voice said, lilting through the huge hall. ‘How would you wish me answer that?’

The place fell silent. Escorted by ten impassive, uniformed officers of the VPHC, High Master Salvador Sondar entered the Hall.

He was blind in one eye and limping badly. His flesh was blistered and charred, and his clothes were tattered. But he was still plant supervisor.

Using an axe-rake as a crutch, Agun Soric bellowed as best his crisped lungs could manage, as he brought over three hundred smeltery workers out through the northern processing ramps of Vervun Smeltery One. Most were as soot-black as he was, the only things showing against the grime being the glistening red of wounds or the white of fresh dressings.

That and the workers’ white, fear-filled eyes.

They carried their injured with them, some on makeshift stretchers, some in carriers made of tied sacking, some pushed in ore-barrows.

Soric stomped around and looked back with his one good eye. Vervun Smeltery One and parts of the surrounding ore plants were burning furiously. Chimney stacks collapsed in the heat, sending up white cinders against the yellow flames. The Veyveyr Rail Terminal, to the west, was also torching out.

He heard shouting and disputes from the concourse below him and he hobbled down, pushing his way through the rows of men and women from his plant.

A dozen Vervun Primary soldiers were stopping the survivors’ advance down transit channel 456/k into the inner habs. A VPHC officer was leading them.

‘We need to get in there,’ Soric said, stomping up to the Commissariat officer. Even with one eye, Soric could see the twitchy, frantic light in the young VPHCer’s eyes.

‘Orders from Main Spine, old man,’ the commissar told him. ‘Low hab is choked with refugees. No more may be admitted. You camp here. Supplies will come in time.’

‘What’s your name?’ Soric asked.

‘Commissar Bownome.’

Soric paused, leaned awkwardly on his crutch, and wiped the ash from his supervisor’s badge with a hawk of spit.

He held it up so the uniformed man could see. ‘Soric, plant supervisor, Smeltery One. We’ve just been bombed to gak and my workers need access to cover and treatment. Now, not in time.’

‘There is no way through. Access is denied. Make your people comfortable here.’ The troopers behind Bownome raised their weapons as punctuation.

‘Here? In a stinking street with the works burning behind us? I don’t think so. Boy, Smeltery One is the property of Noble House Gavunda. We are all Lord Gavunda’s souls. If he hears of this–’

‘I answer only to House Sondar. As should you. Don’t threaten me.’

‘Where’s the gakking threat, you idiot?’ Soric asked, looking round at his massing workers and getting a spirited laugh in answer. ‘A one-eyed cripple like me? Let us through.’

‘Aye, let us through!’ bellowed a worker beside Soric. Ozmac, probably, but it was impossible to tell under the soot. Other workers jeered and agreed.

‘Do you understand what a State of Emergency is, old man?’ Bownome asked.

‘Understand? I’m gakking living it!’ Soric blurted. ‘Stand aside!’ He tried to push past the VPHC officer, but Bownome pushed back and Soric fell off his crutch onto the debris-littered paving.

There were shouts of disbelief and anger. Workers surged forward. Bownome backed away, pulled out his autopistol and fired into the approaching mass.

Ozmac fell dead and another collapsed wounded.

‘That’s it! Enough! Be warned!’ yelled the commissar. ‘You will all stay where–’

Soric’s axe-rake crutch shattered Bownome’s skull and felled him to the ground. Before any of the troopers could react, the workers were on them like a tidal wave. All of the troopers were killed in a few seconds.

The smeltery workers gathered up their weapons. Worker Gannif handed the commissar’s pistol to Soric.

‘I’ll see you right!’ Soric barked. He waved for them to follow him down the transit channel. They cheered him and moved on, at his heels, into the city.

‘Marshal Gnide is dead,’ High Master Sondar told the Legislature. The hall had remained silent as the High Master’s floating throne ascended to the main dais with its stone-faced VPHC vanguard. Sondar’s throne had locked into place above the High Legislator’s dais and the master of Vervunhive had spent a long moment looking out at the assembly before speaking. He was dressed in regal robes, his face masked with a turquoise ceramic janus.

‘Dead,’ Sondar repeated. ‘Our hive faces a time of war – and you, noble houses, low houses, guilders, you decide it is time to usurp my position?’

Silence remained.

Sondar’s masked visage turned to look around at the vast swoop of the tiered hall.

‘We are one, or we are nothing.’

Still the nervous silence.

‘I believe you think me weak. I am not weak. I believe you think me stupid. I am not that either. I believe that certain high houses see this as an opportunity to further their own destinies.’

The High Master allowed Noble Anko to rise with a wave of his hand.

‘We never doubted you, High Lord. The Trade War fell upon us so suddenly.’

You witless weakling, Chass thought. Sondar has led us to this blind and you reconcile sweetly. Where is the fervour that had us vote to take executive action this afternoon?

‘Zoica will be denied,’ Sondar said. Chass watched the High Lord’s movements and saw how jerky they were. It’s not him, he thought. The wretch has sent another servitor puppet to represent him.

‘We have sent word to the Northern Foundry Collectives and to Vannick Magna. They will bolster us with garrison troops. Our counterattack will begin in two days.’

There was delighted commotion from the commons pit and the guild tiers.

Chass rose and spoke. ‘I believe it is in the interests of Verghast as a whole to send to the Imperium for assistance.’

‘No,’ responded Sondar quickly. ‘We have beaten Zoica before; we will do it again. This is an internal matter.’

‘No longer,’ a voice said from below. The assembly looked down at the benches where the officials of the Administratum sat. Hooded and gowned, Intendant Banefail of the Imperial Administratum got to his feet. ‘Astropathic messages have already been sent out, imploring Imperial assistance from Warmaster Macaroth. Vervunhive’s production of ordnance and military vehicles is vital for the constant supply of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. The warmaster will take our plight seriously. This is a greater matter than local planetary politics, High Lord Sondar.’

Sondar, or rather the being that represented him, seemed to quiver in his throne. Rage, Chass presumed. The balance between hive and Imperial authority had always been delicate in Vervunhive, indeed in all the nobilities of Verghast. It was rare for it to clash so profoundly and so visibly. Chass well knew the fundamental strategic import of Vervunhive and the other Verghast manufactory cities to the crusade, but still the magnitude of the intendant’s actions amazed him. The Administratum was the bureaucratic right hand of the Emperor himself, but it usually bowed to the will of the local planetary governor.

Our plight must truly be serious, he realised, a sick feeling seeping into his heart.

Holding the infant and pulling the small boy by the hand, Tona Criid ran through the burning northern section of the Commercia. The boy was crying now. She couldn’t help that. If they could make the docks, she could get them clear across the river and to safety. But the routes were packed. As fast as refugees came into the hive from the south, inhabitants were fleeing to the north.

‘Where we going?’ asked the boy, Dalin.

‘Somewhere safe,’ Tona told him.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m your Aunt Tona.’

‘I don’t have an aunt.’

‘You do now. And so does Yancy here.’

‘Yoncy.’

‘Yeah, whatever. Come on.’ Tona tried to thread them through the massing crowds that filled the transit channels down to the docks, but they were jammed tight.

‘Where are we going?’ asked the kid again as they sheltered in a barter-house awning to avoid the press.

‘Away. To the river.’ That was the plan. But with the crowds this thick, she didn’t know if it was going to be possible. Maybe they’d be safer in the city, under the Shield.

The baby began to cry.

He couldn’t breathe. The weight and blackness upon him were colossal. Something oily was dripping into his eyes. He tried to move, but no movement was possible. No, that wasn’t true. He could grind his toes in his army boots. His mouth was full of rockcrete dust. He started to cough and found his lungs had no room to move. He was squashed.

There was a rattling, chinking sound above him. He could hear voices, distant and muffled. He tried to cry out, but the dust choked him and he had no room to choke.

Light. A chink of light, just above as rubble was moved away. Rubble moved and some pieces slumped heavier on him, vicing his legs and pelvis.

There was a face in the gap above him.

‘Who’s down there?’ it called. ‘Are you alive?’

Hoarse and dry, he answered. ‘My name is Ban Daur – and yes, I am alive.’

His family house was deserted. Guilder Worlin strode inside, leaving a sticky tread of blood in his footprints. His clan was at the Legislature, he was sure. Let them go and bow and scrape to the High Lord.

He crossed the draped room to the teak trolley by the ornamental window and poured himself a triple shot of joiliq. Menx and Troor waited in the anteroom, whispering nervously.

‘Bodyguard! To me!’ Worlin called as the fire of the drink warmed his body. He waved an actuator wand at the wall plate and saw nothing but cycling scrolls of Imperium propaganda. He snapped the plate off and dropped the wand.

His bodyguard approached. They had both shrouded their weapons again, as was the custom inside guild households.

Worlin sat back on the suspensor couch and sipped his drink, smiling. Outside the window, the sprawl of Vervunhive spread out, many parts of it ablaze. The green, Shield-tinted sky contorted with the constant shelling.

‘You have served me well tonight,’ Worlin told them.

The bodyguards paused, uncertain.

‘Menx! Troor! My friends! Fetch yourselves a drink from the cart and relax! Your master is proud of you!’

They hesitated and then turned. Troor raised a decanter as Menx found glasses. As soon as they had their backs to him, Worlin pulled the needle pistol from his robes and fired.

The first shot blew Menx’s spine out and he was flung face first into the cart, which broke under him and shattered. Troor turned and the decanter in his hand was shattered by the second shot. The third exploded his face and he dropped backwards onto the cart wreckage.

Worlin got up and, drink in hand, fired thirty more needles into the twisted corpses, just to be sure. Then he sat back, sipping his drink, watching Vervunhive burn.

‘The road is blocked, sir!’ the tank driver yelled through the intercom to Kowle. Chasing up the Southern Highway, through the wrecked outer habs, with shells still falling, Kowle’s column had reached the rear of the queue of refugees tailing back from Sondar Gate.

Kowle sat up in the turret, looking ahead, taking in the sea of milling bodies before them.

Shells fell to the west and lit up the night.

Kowle dropped into the turret and said, ‘Drive through.’

The driver looked back at him in amazement.

‘But commissar–’

‘Are you denying a direct order?’ Kowle snapped.

‘No, sir, commissar, sir, but–’

Kowle shot him through the throat and dragged his twitching body out of the driver’s seat.

He settled into the blood-slick metal chair and keyed the intercom. ‘Armour column. Follow me.’

Just outhab wretches… worthless, he decided, as he drove the tank down through the masses, crushing a path to the distant gates of Vervunhive.

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‘In Remembrance’ first published in Inferno magazine © 2002,
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