Deathwing (32 page)

‘The Vellacotts control the finest grox farms in this celestial segment. Much of the meat and other produce goes to Delta Khomeini II. That’s a barren mining world, producing rare metals for our Imperium. Perhaps there are secret financial arrangements.’

‘Which are none of our concern.’

‘I implied as much, without saying so.’

‘Ah, a Marine commander needs many skills, does he not?’

‘I thank you, my lord inquisitor.’

Serpilian felt obliged to ask, ‘How goes morale?’ For the Grief Bringers had also lost their Chaplain in action on Valhall II. Hachard hesitated. ‘Be frank. I will not be offended.’

‘The ogryns… they stink.’

Serpilian attempted an injection of humour. ‘They are famous for stinking. If one cannot tolerate some body odour, how can one bear the stench of scorching flesh in combat?’

‘My men will fight alongside the abhumans, with honour. But they don’t like it much. Having to share a ship with those Stenches. I suppose, my lord inquisitor, you insisted on pressing the ogryns into service because, being abhuman and frankly thuggish, they’re more expendable.’

Serpilian winced momentarily. What Hachard implied was perilously close to unthinkable impertinence; yet Serpilian had invited the commander to be outspoken, had he not? The loss of so many brave fighters in the earlier action – however justifiable – was a slight blot on the inquisitor’s personal escutcheon of honour. Marines would willingly sacrifice their lives. They were not, however, suicide-berserkers. To replace them with “expendable” abhumans somewhat smeared the pride of the Grief Bringers, amounting almost to an error of judgement on Serpilian’s part.

One did not polish a fine sword with mud, nor repair a broken one with wood.

Muttering a brief prayer, Serpilian unclipped a pouch from his belt. Breathing deeply and slowly to induce a light trance, he cast his rune bones upon a desk of polished black wood. Those finger and toe bones, minutely inscribed with conjurations, had belonged to a rogue psyker mage whom the Inquisition had executed five centuries earlier. Now these relics served Serpilian’s psychic sense. They were a useful channel for his talent, a focus.

As he concentrated, the pattern of white bones against black swam till a foggy picture formed, visible to him alone.

‘What do you see?’ whispered Hachard reverently.

The thought drifted through Serpilian’s mind, like some seductive siren song, that it wasn’t totally unknown for an inquisitor to sicken of his harsh duties and flee to some lost world, some primitive pastoral planet or other.

Not one such as this moon, certainly! The inquisitor resumed his breathing routine.

‘I see a strapping, comely boy. Though his face isn’t clear. I see the circle of a portal opening from the warp, and coming through it is… abomination.’

‘What species of abomination? Enslavers again?’

A sensible question. The warp entities known as enslavers could open a gateway through the very flesh of a vulnerable psyker and spill out – to do as their name suggested.

Serpilian shook his head. ‘The boy’s being given an aura of protection now to hide him. He’s somewhere within a hundred or so kilometres of the capital city. He’s becoming a powerful psychic receiver. Other psychic talents are sprouting in him. I think he’s about to be possessed. Unless we reach him first.’

‘To capture him, or destroy him?’

‘I fear for his potential power. One day perhaps,’ and Serpilian sketched a pious obeisance, ‘he might be a little like the Emperor himself. Just a little.’

‘Not a new Horus, surely?’ What loathing crept into the commander’s voice as he uttered the name of the corrupted rebel Warmaster who had betrayed the Imperium, and besmirched the honour of so many Marine Chapters, long long ago. ‘If that’s the situation, maybe the relevant quadrant of the moon should be sterilised… though that would include Urpol city and the spaceport, and many grox farms. Delta Khomeini II would starve as a consequence… And the moon has orbital defences as well as its surface troops, who would fight us… They won’t have much battle experience. I think we could do it. I think. Perhaps with our last drop of blood…’

‘Let us pray it doesn’t come to that, Hachard, though your zeal is commendable.’

‘What is finer than death in battle to defend the future of mankind?’

‘If we are in time, this boy must needs be a gift to our Emperor, for His own divine wisdom to judge. Let us head for that moon as soon as our present orbit permits.’

Serpilian uttered a silent prayer that his inner eyesight might pierce the veil that now partially hid the boy.

‘T
HINK OF THE
circle,’ crooned the mouth within Jomi’s head. ‘It grows larger, larger, does it not?’

The boy watched a floater of grox meat depart from Puschik Farm. The engine and cargo section were spattered with mystic runes to help hold the vehicle in the air and encourage the robot brain to find its way to the city. Those runes had recently been repainted. If runes faded or flaked off the hull, the floater might stray from its course or its chiller unit might fail.

Clouds of flies buzzed around a couple of sledges on which piles of scaly hides, some barrels of blood, and sacks of bones were setting out for the much shorter journey to Groxgelt, there to be rendered into glue, and sausages, and crude armour. Whips cracked, slicing through the aerial vermin to tickle the draught-horses into action. The runners creaked across stones worn smooth by centuries of such local transport.

No, thought Jomi, the floater would only break down if it hadn’t been “serviced” properly. The meat-transporter was only a machine, a thing of metal and wires and crystals, based on ancient science from the Dark Age of Technology.

Courtesy of the voice, Jomi knew now that former ages had existed, unimaginable stretches of time unimaginably long ago. The cunent age was a time of “superstition”, so said the voice. An earlier age had been a time of enlightenment. Yet that bygone era was now called dark to the extent that so much had been forgotten about it. So the voice assured him, confusingly. He mustn’t worry his pretty mind overmuch about foul daemons such as Preacher Farb prated about. Such things existed, to a certain extent, that was true. But enlightenment was the route to joy. The owner of the voice said that it had been captured by the storms of “warp-space” long ago, doomed to wander in strange domains for aeons until finally it sensed a dawning psyker talent that was peculiarly attuned to it.

‘You aren’t a witch, dearest boy,’ the voice had assured him. ‘You’re a psyker. Say after me: I’m a psyker, with a glorious mind that deserves to relish all manner of gratifications. Which I, your only true friend will teach you how to attain. Say to yourself: I’m the most lustrous of psykers – and remember to think of the circle, won’t you?’

The owner of the voice would come to Jomi. It would save him from the entrail shed. It would save him from the crushing embrace of fat Galandra Puschik and from the terror of the wheel.

‘Soooooooon,’ cooed the voice, like the coolest of evening breezes. ‘Always think of the circle – like a wheel rolling ever closer to you, but not a wheel to fear!’

‘Why have we been taught to fear wheels?’ An inspiration assaulted Jomi. ‘Surely our sledges would run more easily if we used… a wheel on each corner? Four wheels which turn around as the sledge advances!’

‘Then it would be called a wagon. You’re such a bright lad, Jomi. Bright in so many ways.’ Of a sudden, the voice grew sour and petulant. ‘And here comes spurious brightness to cheer you.’

‘Gretchi!’

Her slim limbs, mainly hidden by a coarse cotton frock, yet imaginable as fair and smooth… her breasts like two young doves nesting beneath the fabric… her chestnut hair hanging in ringlets, mostly veiling a slender neck… the huge straw hat shading that creamy complexion… the teasing eyes of a blue so much less daunting than the sun: how could such perfection have issued from Galandra Puschik’s hips? Gretchi twirled her pink parasol coquettishly.

Did he gawp?

‘Whatever are you thinking, Jomi Jabal?’ she asked, as if inviting him to flatter her naively – or even vulgarly, to excite her.

He swallowed. He muttered the truth. ‘About science…’

Gretchi pouted. ‘Would that be the art of sighing for a girl, perhaps? Fine lords will sigh for me in Urpol some day soon, believe me!’

Could he possibly tell her his secret? Surely she wouldn’t betray him?

‘Gretchi, if it were possible for you to go much further away than Urpol—’

‘Where’s further than Urpol? Urpol’s the centre of everything hereabouts.’

‘—would you go?’

‘Surely you don’t mean to some farm in the furthest hinterland?’ She wrinkled up her nose pettishly. ‘Surrounded by muties, no doubt!’

He pointed at the sky. ‘No, much further away. To the stars, and to other worlds.’

She laughed at him, though not entirely with derision. Perhaps this good-looking youth could tickle her fancy in unexpected ways?

Should he whisper in her ear, arranging a rendezvous after work to hear his secret?

‘Remember the cruel wheel, Jomi,’ warned the voice.

‘When you come, voice, can I take Gretchi with me?’

Did he hear a faint, stifled snarl in the depths of his mind?

Gretchi simpered. ‘Are you pretending to ignore me now? Are your feelings hurt? What do you know of feelings?’

He stared at the twin soft birds of her bosom, yearning to cup them in his hands. But his hands were soiled with blood and bile, the memory came to him of Gretchi’s mother feeling Jomi assiduously in her foetid imagination, exploring and squeezing him, and out of the corner of his eye he noticed Galandra Puschik glaring from the veranda of the farmhouse. Gretchi must have spied her mother too, for she promptly flounced away, turning up her nose as if at some foul reek.

‘H
UH
!’ G
RIMM, THE
tough stocky red-bearded dwarf, said to himself. ‘Huh indeed, a world that bans wheels! Strange and many are the worlds!’ The squat pushed back his forage cap to scratch his bald pate, which was scarred from a battle wound on Valhall. As a result of this injury, his skull had been shaved clean, and he was trying out baldness as a style. Fewer nesting places for lice! Now he would be compelled to leave his beloved trike, mounted with twin cannon, in the hold of the Imperial ship.

Grimm scanned the cavernous plasteel dormitory through his dark shades. Imperial icons gleamed, each lit by a glow-globe, sharing wall space with cruder battle-fetishes of the giants, one of which was draped respectfully with a ram’s intestines from the arrival feast the night before. Scraps of meat, hair, broken bones littered the floor, mashed into the semblance of a brown and grey carpet on which assorted insectoid vermin grazed, or lay crushed themselves. The dormitory had ceased to reek; it had transcended stench, attaining a new plane of foetor as though the air had transmuted. Stinks did not usually perturb Grimm, but he wore nostril filters.

‘Huh!’

The ogryn, Thunderjug’ Aggrox, quit sharpening his yellow tusks on a rasp. ‘Woz matter, titch?’

Sergeant-Ogryn Aggrox was a BONEhead, who had undergone Biochemical Ogryn Neural Enhancement. Thus he was capable of a degree of sophisticated conversation. Could be trusted with a ripper gun too.

Grimm, natty in his green coveralls and quilted red flak jacket, surveyed the crudely tattooed megaman in his coarse cloth and chain mail. Several battle badges were riveted to the giant’s thick skull.

‘I suppose,’ said Grimm, ‘being forced to walk or ride draught horses keeps the peasants in their places, don’t it?’

‘Seems use floaters, though,’ objected Thunderjug.

‘Oh well, you need to hurry fresh meat to the spaceport and up into orbit to be void-frozen. In my not-so-humble opinion banning wheels is going a bit over the top. I like wheels.’ Especially the wheels of his battletrike. ‘I guess in this neck of the galaxy the wheel represents the godless science of the Dark Age…’

In common with all squats, Grimm was an instinctive technician. Watching Imperial “technicians” sketch hexes against malfunction amidst their rune-painted machinery and hearing them utter incantations to an engine disturbed him mildly. In a sense his own race were in a direct line of descent from the obscure ancient days of science, when warp storms had cut the squattish mining worlds off, to evolve independently.

Oh my sacred ancestors! he thought. Still, everybody to their own religion.

Most of these thoughts were too complicated to convey even to a BONEhead ogryn.

The giant plucked a thumb-sized louse from his armpit and crunched the grey parasite speculatively between his teeth. Just then, ogryn voices bellowed.

Two warriors had bared their tusks. Seizing mace and axe respectively, they began to hack at one another’s chainmail in a bellicose competition. Spectators roared wagers in favour of one combatant or the other, or both, stamping their great feet so that the steel dormitory rocked and groaned.

Thunderjug lowered his head and charged along the dormitory. He butted left, he butted right with his steel-plated skull. The quarrellers resisted, butting back at their sergeant, though not disrespectful enough to raise axe or mace against him. Finally Thunderjug seized the two by the neck and crashed their heads together in the manner of two wrecking balls till the fighters subsided and agreed to behave.

‘Shu’rup all!’ After issuing that command, Thunderjug ambled back, spat out a broken tooth, and grinned. ‘Gorra keep order, don’ I?’

Grimm removed his fingers from his ears, and combed some mites from his beard. Would he have been happier billeted with the true-human Grief Bringers? Undoubtedly more comfortable; less liable to be squashed by a reeling heavyweight. On the other hand, he had come to count on Thunderjug as something of a friend, a brainy bull among this herd of buffalos. Grimm prided himself on mixing with all sorts and conditions. He hadn’t too much experience of Imperial Marines. There weren’t all that many in the galaxy. But they seemed a shade cliquish.

Exemplary fellows, needless to say, but so devoutly dedicated to the traditions of their Chapters. A roving squat, who only gave nodding acquiescence to the worship of the Emperor, saw the universe from a slightly different angle.