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Rotten To The Core – Extract

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ROTTEN TO THE CORE

Sandy Mitchell

The thing about void stations is that the clue’s in the name. Small bubbles of life and air, completely surrounded by infinite amounts of frak all. I’ve passed through more than I can count over the years, for the most part in orbit around major Imperial worlds, or outer-system way stations, but the ones that tend to stick in my mind are the ones that most exemplify their appellation. The warp currents are fickle, and not all flow directly to inhabited solar systems; there are places where they converge in the deepest, darkest night, several light years from the nearest star, and in those places stations grow up to service the starships plying them, aiding in the transhipment of cargoes, passengers and, inevitably, troop movements.

Which is how I came to find myself aboard void station Kappa Septum, on my way back to Coronus with the 597th after our eventful little jaunt to Simia Orichalcae. There was, of course, no particular logistical reason why the freighter chartered by the Munitorum to deliver us to that desolate ice ball couldn’t have taken us all the way back, but Amberley wanted to debrief the senior officers, including me, in some detail about what we’d found there. And the arrival of an inquisitor on an Imperial Guard garrison world would hardly have gone unremarked. Accordingly, she’d seen to it that we were diverted to a void station about as far from anywhere as it was possible to get. There, we could rendezvous with a troop ship filled with what was left from a couple of regiments who had been engaging the t’au in a disputed system somewhere along the border.

Not that anyone was complaining; Kappa Septum was a major transhipment point, which meant that it was one of the largest void stations I’d ever seen. Not so much a habitat as an entire hive floating in space. Its outermost layer was as opulent as any city you might find planetside. There was the added bonus of spectacular views of the entire Eastern Arm curving away gently overhead through the armaglass cladding, and the speckling of isolated stars and other galaxies. Not to mention the riding lights of the innumerable vessels arriving and departing from the docking areas at either end, like an endless swarm of fireflies.

Amberley had pitched up in a hotel suite midway between the two harbour zones, which probably cost roughly my annual stipend per diem. But since I got the benefit of it too, I was hardly complaining – and if Kasteen and Broklaw thought anything of my extended absence from the regiment, they were too tactful to press the matter. Jurgen, my indefatigable and odiferous aide, dropped by once a day to keep me up to speed, but he was more than capable of handling the routine paperwork. There was relatively little for me to do while the regiment was idle, anyway. They’d dispersed among the bars, bordellos and gambling dens immediately surrounding the docking ports, and, if I knew the average trooper as well as I thought I did, would lack the interest, inclination or funds to explore their surroundings any further. Barring any serious infractions of the regulations, or the local laws, my duties had been effectively confined to collecting the night’s gutter sweepings from the dockside watch-houses and imposing the most minimal sanctions I could get away with without appearing to be a soft touch. After what they’d been through, I felt they deserved to let off a bit of steam.

All good things, however, come to an end, and after a remarkably pleasant interlude – apart from having to relive the horrors we’d so recently experienced in exhaustive detail – Amberley departed, leaving me to make my way back to the 597th’s staging area and resume my duties in earnest.

‘Welcome back,’ Kasteen said in greeting as I entered our makeshift headquarters, a trans-shipment facility conveniently close to the docks with enough storage space for our vehicles, munitions and other supplies. Although we had precious little left of any of those, having abandoned the bulk of our materiel in the press of the evacuation. On the plus side, that had left us plenty of room for the troopers to bed down in comfortably, which was good for morale. Not to mention there was enough space to set up firing ranges and other training facilities, which kept them occupied and (for the most part) out of the kind of trouble requiring my intervention. ‘Your timing’s impeccable.’

‘It is?’ I asked. I hadn’t exactly hurried back, preferring to cover the handful of kilometres between where we were now and the outer hull on foot. I haven’t made it through to an honourable retirement by taking anything for granted, and even back then the habit of making sure I knew where the best lines of retreat were, just in case the Emperor chose to play one of His little jokes on me, had become deeply ingrained.

In truth, I’d found little to surprise me during my journey back, the resemblance to a planetside hive remaining strong; which is to say that as I’d descended I’d found the opulent luxury of the outer layers successively displaced by the merely wealthy, the comfortable, and the tolerable. Further in, towards the centre of the vast construction, I had no doubt that I’d find more industry and infrastructure, interlaced with the habitations of the workers who kept it all functioning, before reaching whatever the local equivalent of the underhive would be, home to the forgotten, dispossessed and desperate.

Kasteen nodded, and gestured towards the office I’d hardly set foot in since our arrival. Jurgen was visible through the glass panel in the door, occupying a desk strategically placed to obstruct anyone attempting to enter, in front of which a civilian was standing in the familiar posture of someone who’d already spent an inordinate amount of time being thwarted in his attempts to do so.

‘Who’s that, and what does he want?’ I asked. My visitor was conservatively and expensively dressed, and clearly someone who expected deference – an attitude Jurgen reserved for the Emperor Himself and, to some extent, me, so he was going to be out of luck there.

‘The watch commander,’ Kasteen said, referring to the locals who did their best to enforce the law here. She shrugged, with a typical Guardswoman’s complete lack of interest in anything which might concern a civilian. ‘Says he wants to talk to you urgently.’

‘Right,’ I said, thinking I understood. So far I’d had nothing more serious to sort out than the usual inebriates and the occasional brawl, but someone had clearly been making an effort to raise the stakes – I found myself hoping no one had been killed, as the amount of paperwork that kind of thing could generate was seriously annoying. Straightening my cap and sash, I strode into the office.

‘Commissar.’ My visitor stuck out a hand, realised I wasn’t going to shake it, and nodded a curt greeting instead. ‘Goran Barloe, Kappa Septum watch commander.’

‘Commander.’ I favoured him with a nod of my own. ‘I trust our troopers are behaving themselves?’

‘As well as we expected,’ Barloe said. ‘Which is why the station administrator wants to borrow some.’

Whatever I’d been expecting him to say, this wasn’t it. I gestured past the glowering Jurgen, towards the as-yet-unused visitors’ chair in front of my own desk, behind which I settled. ‘The disposition of our assets is for Colonel Kasteen to decide,’ I said. ‘My role is purely advisory. Why come to me?’

‘Because Her Excellency hopes you’ll advise her too,’ Barloe volleyed back. ‘Even though my department has the situation well in hand.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ I lied smoothly. It wouldn’t be the first time a complacent local judiciary got so caught up in arse covering and counting paperclips they were completely blindsided when the local proletariat decided it was time the governor retired. Preferably at the pointy end of something sharp. I took my first good look at him. Big, and well muscled under a deceptive veneer of recently acquired fat. Someone who’d come up through the ranks, then, not just been handed his job due to social or family connections. I leaned forward a little, prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘But why does your boss think we can help?’

Barloe shrugged. ‘Because she’s panicking,’ he said dismissively. ‘We’ve always had gangers from the core raiding the docksides. Most of them have had the sense to keep the pilferage light, and disappear before we can respond.’

‘And now the raids are increasing?’ I asked, drawing the obvious conclusion.

Barloe nodded. ‘More frequent, in greater force, and more heavily armed. They’re willing to fight their way out now, too, instead of just running for it.’

I thought about this. You don’t grow up in an underhive without acquiring a reasonable familiarity with gangers and their tactics, and these sounded atypically motivated. They’ll fight among themselves happily enough, but confronting the authorities directly never ends well, and is something they’ll avoid if at all possible.

‘So what’s changed?’ I asked. ‘And why now?’

Barloe shot me the kind of look normally directed at Jurgen when he innocently articulated what everyone else was too polite to admit they were thinking, and pushed a pict screen across the desk towards me. A mob of scofflaws in a looted warehouse, waving crude stubbers around with all the enthusiasm of orks.

‘We got this from the last raid.’ He looked at me, as though it meant something obvious.

I shrugged, in no mood for guessing games, and Barloe pointed out a couple of the blurry figures. ‘Skull tattoos. Shaven heads. That’s two different gangs working together. And, trust me, those particular ones were murdering each other every chance they got a couple of years ago.’

‘Sounds like a leader’s emerged down there then,’ I said. ‘Someone capable of pulling the gangs together.’

Barloe nodded again. ‘Which Her Excellency seems to think is going to lead to a full-scale insurrection. Hence the request for your assistance. She wants them eradicated once and for all.’

‘Never going to happen,’ I said. ‘Taking out gangers is like punching holes in a river.’ For a moment I wondered if he knew what one of those was, being a voider and all, but he seemed to take my meaning.

‘A complete waste of everyone’s time,’ he agreed dismissively.

I sighed, with every appearance of regret I could feign, and was on the verge of telling him I couldn’t in all conscience advise the colonel to agree to the request, when I took a closer look at the pict in front of me. And my blood ran cold.

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