All That Remains - James Swallow

  All That Remains

  James Swallow

  The deck tilted under my feet until I was walking like a crab, one foot on what used to be the floor, the other on what was the starboard-side wall. Gravity had become unusual, and it spread itself in peculiar patterns throughout the ship’s corridors.

  Some strange artefact of the malfunctions, perhaps? I didn’t know enough to tell. It’s not where my expertise lies, but I imagined that if I could have seen it, the gravity would pile like drifts of snow blown into odd corners. Snow like we had at home, on Nomeah, before the melts and the ending.

  Flicking that thought away, I used the sconces in the walls as hand-holds, taking care to first beat out any flickering electro-candles with the butt of my lasrifle. The others kept pace behind me, and I could hear them all labouring their breaths in the cold, heavy air. I didn’t need to turn to see the aura-light around their heads. I knew it would be unchanged: anger-red and terror-black.

  Without the ship’s internal illumination, the only way we could navigate was by the sullen glow from the chamber at the far end of the corridor. Long shadows reached toward us, inky and fathomless. I felt as if I were some parasitic thing crawling up the throat of a dead host animal, questing for the open, fanged mouth.

  The noise of slow-twisting metals surrounded us as the ship was continually stressed and relaxed. I was no void-born, but I had ridden in starships on many occasions and I knew what sounded wrong. I knew the sound of something tested to breaking point. Something that was going to die.

  The thought fatigued me and I stopped to rest. I felt heavy and damp, as if I had been dragged through ice water; uniform, war-cloak, pack and all. The lip of a jammed hatch served as a temporary halt, and the others accepted it readily.

  Dallos sat closest to me and immediately had his cards out, his spindly pink fingers going over them. He worked the careworn rectangles of plas-paper with the rote deftness of a gambling sharp. The cards glinted, the print across their faces worn away in places where he had dealt and re-dealt them a thousand times. I could make out the faint numerals and the abstract geometric shapes of the suits.

  ‘Four of Emeralds,’ he muttered, unaware of himself. ‘Two of Hammers.’

  Dallos’s face was half-hidden under a mask of dirty bandages. A monster had burned him, so I’d learned. The nimbus of a bolt of spewed fire had passed close to his unit, enough to torch the rest of the men in his mortar crew but not enough to kill him. What I could see of Dallos’s face was pink like his hands, where he had beat out the backwash flames – as raw as his aura, and just as bright.

  Not a one of us was what you could call able. I think even the most generous of observers would have considered us to be a sorry collection of souls. Six men, clad in uniforms of the great Imperial Army, a scooping of poor bloody infantry from half a dozen different battalions all across the front line of the insurrection. We were the canis-facies, the sons of worlds ground up into chum by the inexorable machine of this new war. I think we all had badges of differing rank and status, but the memory evades. On the ship, it never mattered. No one was in charge, there was no chain of command. We simply were. Any intentions to salute or to snap to orders seemed pointless. A lot of things seemed pointless after all the horrors we had witnessed.

  But so we were. I had lost fingers on my right hand – my off-hand, and so somehow I interpreted that as lucky – and taken shrapnel in my torso and thigh. The pieces were still in me, needles pricking me with each step I took. The small pains made me tired as much as they kept me awake. Dallos, as I said, was the burned man. Breng, with his skin the deep ebon of varnished wood, he showed the puckering and scarification of a gas attack victim. It was agony for him to speak, the poor fool’s throat now a ruin, so he communicated as much through tilts of the head and hollow glares as he could. I think LoMund might have been an officer once, back when it mattered. That would explain the long white hair and the regal cut of his face, perhaps. That bit of him was broken, though. He had been belly-cut and spilled on the mud, saved only because blind panic and adrenaline had made him cup his own innards in his hands for long enough to stagger back to a safe zone. Then Chenec and Yao, each sallow of flesh with perpetually hooded eyes, both from the same world and both having been near-killed by claws and stubber fire.

  We were a small pack of walking wounded. I had not seen an uninjured man – and we were all men, for there were no females on this vessel – since we had disembarked from the rescue boat that bore me from Nomeah. The closest thing I had come across to the hale and whole were the lobotomised medicae servitors that prowled the ward decks, tending to the injured. If there were actual medics and chirurgeons on board this hulk, then they had not cared to turn their attention to us.

  There were so few of us, but what took my pause was that the ship was still full. The holds carried children. Refugee boys out of ruined families or from bombed-out scholaria, war orphans by the dozen. Sometimes we heard them crying for their parents, for answers, for anything. It burned me, in a way, to admit that I was as lost as they were.

  This was one ship among several, or so I thought. In truth, I hadn’t seen a porthole since we jumped into the screaming madness of the warp and fled the perfidy of the whoreson Warmaster. Whether or not the other craft were still out there, I didn’t know. A few gunboats protecting bulk carriers packed to the gunwales with injured, our pathetic little convoy stopped here and there to pick up other contingents of the similarly injured. I had heard that some of the other vessels carried wounded Space Marines; was such a thing possible, I wondered? It seemed fanciful that any of the Imperium’s immortal champions could ever suffer something so mundane as a mere wound.

  And so, in time none of us had the first clue as to where we were or to which points of the aetheric compass we were headed. The only constant was the lamentation of the almost-dead echoing through the cavernous wards as they fought nightmares in their sleep. That, and the sound of the engines.

  But after a time, I began to notice patterns. That’s what I’m good at.

  I can see things.

  I don’t speak of it much because it can frighten an unwary soul, and anger others into rash action. People don’t like what they cannot understand, and they tend to react with violence over all else. In the ranks of the Imperial Army, that violence can come by blade or las-bolt, so it is conducive to a man’s wellbeing not to go looking for it.

  The patterns – on ships like this, there’s always a mix of the wounded, from those sad cases who would be better given the Emperor’s Peace to the ones who are little more than malingerers. Not on this vessel, though. I saw that the injured here were all souls who could, if care were given, make it back to the front lines. In all the passage through the ship’s labyrinthine interiors, I had not come upon one that could not have been healed to fight another day. Those more needy or less likely to survive had been transferred off when we docked or made rendezvous with other medicae ships in deep space. The ones who replaced them had faces of familiar cast.

  You could see it in the eyes. Dallos and LoMund and the others here, every man we met along the way – I saw that same look staring back at me from the mirror. Not just the thousand-yard stare of a soldier, not just that. A shared burden that none of us could talk about, because we had all spent our lives denying it. Hiding it.

  ‘S-Six of Crosses,’ Dallos stuttered, working the cards into a blur of movement. ‘Ace. The Ace of D-daggers. The other ships are gone.’

  We had been climbing for the better part of a day, up from the amidships levels where the radiation shielding was heavy and immovable, locking us in. The l
ower decks, the engineering spaces, weren’t connected to the wards, and there seemed little reason to seek a way to reach them. We numbered few and those of us who were mechanically savvy were far from enginseers. Breng was the closest thing we had to a technologian, being a ship hand and pilot-savant.

  It seemed more logical to head up, to find the flying bridge and command tiers. At first I insisted that we look to the youths in the other compartments, perhaps to lend them some courage… but there seemed little point to that. We had none to spare.

  Recall that I spoke before of the constants of sound, the moaning and the engines; I had woken the day before from a fitful sleep full of dream-colours, to a reality of cold silence from the warp motors. Without explanation, we were suddenly adrift. Malfunctions came soon after. Power gave out in sudden falls of darkness and creeping waves of hoarfrost. Air fouled and became still. Worse were the doors that fell like great blades guillotining down across the corridors, sealing off sections of the ship without warning.

  There had been nothing to suggest collision or impact by enemy weapons. After a few hours, when we were still alive and the corridors were not crawling with blood-hungry xenos, murderous traitors or… the other things, we drew plans to investigate.

  I saw patterns, but I hadn’t seen any sign of this one forming. That’s why I volunteered – that and the fact that I could hold a gun. The few that we had liberated from an emergency armoury, we clutched to us like talismans of protection. If the new enemy was out there, of course, I wondered how much use the guns would be to us. At best, they were a comforting illusion of strength.

  I remembered the streets of Nomeah running red. I remembered the giants slaughtering all who dared to stand or who did not flee fast enough. I remembered the horrors, but only as blurs of meat and talons and blood, as if my mind had smudged out the memory of them rather than know it with any clarity.

  I looked down at the hand with the missing fingers, and the echo of stark pain was there, cold and quick.

  ‘Hecane?’ Yao was the one who eventually spoke. ‘We move on?’ He gestured towards the dim light ahead, asking the question of me, of all of us.

  I nodded. ‘We move on.’

  I know what kind of war this is.

  I’ve fought on a dozen worlds in the Akarli Cluster and far beyond, on deserts and in oceans, through cloud-reaches and mountain passes, but Nomeah was my home. We always seemed to come back to there. A rough rabble of people we had been called, and that was right. Constantly infighting, each of our tribes nurturing grudges against the others like they were our offspring.

  What can you say of the Nomeahi? That we know how to hate. That we can find an insult in a bouquet of roses. Those things are true. But it is also true that we love our Emperor and we are proud of our Imperium. Perhaps that is why our petty little differences were tolerated by the bureaucrats of Terra – they let us bloody each other in our small rivalries because they knew that when the call came, we would pick up arms and march side by side without hesitation. All enmities forgotten for the moment, in the Emperor’s name. Our contentious nature makes us good warrior stock. I’ll point you to a dozen planets brought hard into compliance by regiments born of worlds in the Akarli sector. We did our part for the Great Crusade, that was never in question.

  Of course, in recent times, we started to trickle home and fight amongst ourselves once again, but never enough to make it an issue beyond our own borders. But then the change came, the rebellion, the insurrection – the heresy, as some of the more histrionic called it. Many didn’t understand at first, and then they were dead. But I understood. I find patterns. I know betrayal when I see it.

  It runs like lifeblood through the veins of this war. It is what powers the will of the traitors, and the men who foolishly think that they can ride the edges of the bastard Horus’s cloak. This war is not being fought for desire of power. It is not a just revolution against the yoke of an oppressor. Materiel and territory? Those are objectives of passing interest. No, what we face here is treachery for treachery’s sake. I think I knew that from the first, but it is only now that I have the words to express the thought. Now that I have had the time to think on it.

  Horus, may he die a thousand deaths, is the very definition of traitor. The purest evolution of that idea made manifest. He’s a son hating the father, a citizen betraying his state, a patriot burning his flag, a commander killing his soldiers. For all his gene-engineered origins, Horus is a human sacrificing humanity. He is the worst of us.

  I know this, not because I have seen the Warmaster, or spoken to him or anything like that; I know it because I have seen with these eyes the horrors that he has called to battle in his name.

  And fate take me, in my dreams I have stood upon the edge of the crumbling abyss that he seeks to plunge us into.

  It was perhaps a day later when we finally made it to the command tiers. Many corridors up there were sealed by those thick drop-doors, and the ones with glassy portals allowed me to look through and see vacuum-bloated corpses in the compartments beyond, drifting in null-gravity. More life support failures, more unlucky dead, young and old alike.

  ‘Didn’t live this long to be killed by bloody machines failing,’ Chenec grated. ‘Not burning my luck now!’ He fingered a chain habitually worn around his wrist, a line of metal beads dull with age. I think he could hear something in the way they rattled, but if that were so, Chenec never sought to talk about it.

  I was going to answer him, but then I saw LoMund and Breng bringing up their guns. A heartbeat later, footsteps were coming toward us.

  I listened. You learn quick when the horrors are abroad. You learn how to hear for talons scraping and bones dragging. This was just the clatter of boots on metal plates, but I wasn’t about to be casual. I’ve seen things that will look like men to your eyes, but with auras belonging to monsters that only the insane could imagine.

  A youth stumbled around the corner and we nearly shot him for his temerity. He saw us and almost fouled his britches in shock. ‘Don’t shoot!’ he cried. The boy was barely a teenager, shaven-headed and dirty.

  ‘Who the blades are you?’ demanded LoMund, pointing with his laspistol. ‘Talk!’

  He did, collapsing and babbling all at once. He told us his name was Zartine, a foundling boy from a city orphanage on Zofor’s World, bold enough to slip out of the lower wards to explore the ship and now regretting it. He was utterly terrified, and not just of us. I could see his colours flashing orange, out of control.

  I helped him up. ‘Calm down, lad. What are you doing up here? Do you know what happened to the ship?’

  ‘I know!’ Zartine snapped back. ‘It’s worse than you think. They’re here, don’t you see? Can’t you hear them?’ He waved at the air, hands clutching at nothing. ‘Space Marines!’

  Breng made a noise like he was hawking up phlegm. ‘No legionaries here.’

  ‘Wrong!’ shouted the youth. He pointed over his shoulder. ‘Down there. Saw him.’

  ‘He isn’t lying.’ It was a second before I realised that it was Dallos who had spoken. I turned and found him with the damned deck in his hands again, his rifle stowed.

  ‘Eight of Hammers.’

  He held up the worn card to show us all, as if it were a warrant of absolute truth.

  All of a sudden, I was incensed at his moronic little game, and I crossed the distance to Dallos in a rush, slapping the cards out of his grip with a savage backhand. ‘You don’t know!’ I snarled, fighting back a surge of panic. ‘You can’t know that!’ Dread coiled inside me, icy and thick.

  Dallos wailed and immediately dived at the deck, snatching up the cards where they had scattered. He seemed so hurt by my action. My anger was strangled and guilt washed over me. Guilt and fear.

  Let me tell you how it happened on Nomeah. Let me show you the little war of my life, the microcosm of the greater treachery that even now writh
es across the stars, writing itself into our history.

  You would think that because of who we were, the conflict would have come in blood and thunder from the outset. Man against man, neighbours fighting neighbours. Well, all that did come, but not at first. The start of it was insidious, and for that I hate Horus all the more. He didn’t come to our worlds with warships and guns; he didn’t even consider us worthy of those things. Nomeah and the worlds of Arkarli were set upon the path to dissolution and ruin by a handful of perfidious agents, less than a platoon’s worth. Fifth columnists, interlopers and sneaks who turned us against ourselves.

  We gave them fertile ground, idiots that we were. A web of old jealousies, lines of distrust that were ripe for exploitation. Where the Emperor’s light of illumination had united us, the Warmaster’s shadow divided.

  And the cleverness of it was the perfect, fractal nature of the deceit. It scaled up and down, using the same tools to embellish ingrained hatreds between whole worlds, nations, cities. All the way down until it was street against street, house against house, brother against brother. We all hated so very well on Nomeah and, directed by callous hands, that hatred ripped us apart.

  But not all at once. It was subtle, careful.

  I remember with blinding clarity the day when the poison of it bubbled to the surface in my platoon. Note that we were nothing special – just a division of riflemen with no great laurels and banners to carry before us. No impressive name or clever sobriquet. There was a force number attached to our division and nothing else. In the scheme of the Emperor’s Great Crusade, we were quite ordinary. But that was not enough to protect us.

  For months, almost a solar year, things had been changing at far distant command. Directives would come to Nomeah and we would be told that new rules were in place. Each was presented to us like a gift, not as a demand, but if one resisted then the velvet fell away to reveal iron beneath. Refusal was not encouraged.

  Soldiers and officers alike were simply told that things had changed, that this was the way of it now. As much as we grumbled and sneered, as much as those angry thoughts became angry words, nothing was undone. Piece by piece, the line of loyalty began to move. We tipped towards the edge by degrees, though the motion of the gradient seemed insignificant each time.