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Seven Ships – Extract

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Seven Ships

Russell Zimmerman

Once, I had a name, and a purpose, and a certainty of the galaxy and of my place in it. I had been a cadet at the Schola Progenium, a student, an earnest, eager servant of the God-Emperor of Mankind, cursed be his name, wretched be his Carrion Throne. My master took that name from me, and that purpose, and that certainty. My master blessed me with terrible freedom. My master calls me Scrivener now.

I earned it. Standing in the rubble that had once been the Schola Progenium consecrated to honour Saint Aeliana of the Clear Waters, I took that name with my own two hands. My old name? My Imperium-name? I had simply been given it, granted it, had it handed to me for the pitiful act of being born – a mewling, pink-faced, wretched thing, slick with my mother’s blood. Scrivener, though? Scrivener I had earned. The hard way. The honest way.

‘You two. Boys. Come here.’ Master Fecht had pointed at us, standing at the top of the stairs, amidst the rubble that had been our scholam. So many had died – the air had been so thick with flies – the warring stinks of blood, faeces and smoke had been so strong – that my mind had desperately wanted to focus on something, anything, but the world around me. And so my mind had settled on him. My Master Fecht. Fecht was a murderous giant who did not need the stairs to loom over us but stood atop them regardless. A titan in sickly green armour the colour of a week-old bruise or a month-old corpse. Fecht. A Plague Marine of the Death Guard.

‘One of you will record our deeds. One of you will bear witness. One of you will chronicle the marks we leave.’

His helmeted head turned ever so slightly to regard the pair of us. It was featureless, as sharp and powerful as the prow of a ship, slick with mucus or something like it, streaked here and there with rust and old blood. It gave nothing away. From within it, his voice came out tinny, somehow moist, but never lacking in strength or certainty.

‘One,’ he said.

Next to me stood another senior student, Gaerhardt Vetrule. The two of us had been plucked from the survivors seemingly at random. We had grown up together. I remembered trying to catch up to him, trying to rival him at all, in anything. He had been our best, he had led our class. I remembered admiring him, respecting him, envying him all of my short, meaningless life. It had been easy to imagine him doing us all proud in the Commissariat or Ordo Tempestus some day, as easy as picturing others of my progena classmates rising to be heroes of the Astra Militarum, the Imperial Navy or perhaps even the Adepta Sororitas. It had all come so easily to Gaerhardt, and those like him. It had always come so easily to them. I had struggled. I had floundered. I had been punished, time and again, for not returning the Golden Throne’s generosity with excellence. I had never once imagined myself as an officer or a hero, as someone who mattered or would live on, immortal, in history books.

As Fecht spoke his terms I thought back on our shared childhoods and had no doubt that Gaerhardt Vetrule would beat me in a fair fight. I did not give him one.

I felt the bitterness rise in me as bile at the back of my throat, but instead of spitting out the mouthful of vomit, I croaked out something like a roar. Before anyone had given us any signal to begin, I had grabbed Gaerhardt by the head, tackled him to the stone stairs leading to our ravaged chapel, and begun pounding. I hammered his head against those steps. I hammered his head until he didn’t have a head left worth mentioning, until I could barely hold on to what remained of it. I looked up, and Fecht nodded.

I had lived, Gaerhardt had died, and I had become the chronicler – the Scrivener. I had become someone who mattered.

I began to write the tale of the Heretic Astartes champion Katarrh Fecht, Plague Marine, Death Guard, Venomariner. My liberator. My master. The lord of a warband that had fallen onto insignificant Dastignon Secundus, blessing it with their misery, their spite, and their power.

Dastignon had always been small, as agri worlds went, but it was green and fertile. Grasslands had been turned to wheat and rice fields untold generations ago, and it had been a breadbasket – a feeder world – and little else for thousands of years. The population had been kept small, the output high; the majority of the planet was nearly barren of humanity, just rolling fields of grain threshers and ploughs, combines and row croppers, spreaders and sprayers, and just enough people to keep them all working. Dastignon had one city, and to the best of my knowledge, one institution worth mentioning. Us.

Someone somewhere very far away, very long ago, had decided the central location of Dastignon within the sector made it ideal not only for distributing foodstuffs in an efficient manner, but also as a dumping ground where war orphans like me could be collected and refurbished. The idyllic grasslands and rolling hills had given our Schola Progenium facility ample room to train, and it was, after all, cheaper to raise us where our food was produced than to feed us elsewhere. We had been the children of Dastignon, immigrants from far-off worlds. We had been raised to serve the Golden Throne, a tithe measured and delivered like any sack of barley or wheat. We had been trained to protect the Imperium.

But the Imperium had failed to protect us in return.

It had started as an illness. Our larders had spoiled unexpectedly, our well water turned sour, but as our bellies twisted with hunger and we lost our heads to feverish thirst, we had eaten and drunk regardless. Our bodies had rejected the fouled food from both ends, and the reek of sickness had filled our barracks.

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