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  Gone for a Soldier

  William King

  That night our lives changed utterly. If I close my eyes I can still picture it perfectly: the winter-cold street the hundred-storey tenement blocks rising all around us, the flickering gaslights, the crunch of soot-stained snow beneath our boots. We crossed Stormspike Span where it leapt across the thousand-foot drop between the Factory Sector and the Forgemarket and emerged onto the deck of Urban Level Twelve. In the distance, as far as the eye could see, enormous towers and chimneys rose into the night and over everything, belching sparks and flames, loomed the sky-tall smokestack of Murdstone’s Forge.

  The cold numbed my face. A snowflake gave up its chemical tang on my tongue. Anton danced around us, waving his fists and squaring up to Ivan in a clownish fashion. He was full of mad chatter as usual, talking about how the Adeptus Astartes were the greatest heroes of humanity, had superhuman powers and lived for thousands of years. He was convinced that if you were brave enough, loyal enough and prayed hard enough, you too could become a Space Marine.

  If any of that had been true poor Anton would have achieved his ambition and some of the rest of us might have too. We certainly thought it was possible then but we were young and had never seen anything except what existed beneath the dull, polluted sky of Belial. We didn’t know any better.

  Ivan was a quiet, serious boy, tall and muscular with a long face and dark curly hair. He carried himself with the poise of up-and-coming pit-boxer. He dreamed of getting away from the grind of the factory, of making his fortune beating out the brains of others for the pleasure of the rich who came down to the pits at Judson’s Maze. When he was rich, he said, he would open a gin-house and we could have free drink and food whenever we liked. He was a generous boy, and to us, constantly hungry and constantly poor, it sounded like a vision of heaven.

  In the few hours he had after work he practised in the gymnasium on Hyde Street along with all the other would-be pit fighters and some of the hard boys of our neighbourhood. Even then he was not a lad you messed with - well, not more than once. He was quick with his hands and fast with his feet and when he hit you, you felt as if you had been struck by one of the great descending pistons in the cog-house of the factory. I sparred with him a few times. It was a mistake I did my best not to repeat when I got older and a little wiser.

  That night Ivan planned to graft on his kicks and punches and Anton and I were simply killing time. We did not want to go back to the tiny apartments we shared with our families and throw ourselves down on our pallets and wake up muscles aching to go back to work the next day. The street was our best and only entertainment and you never knew who you might run into if you hung out there long enough.

  If we had known what was going to happen we would have run home and locked the doors and windows and counted ourselves lucky, but we didn’t and thus our lives were altered, Macharius was saved, and the Imperium still exists in this part of our dark and terrible galaxy.

  ‘What was that?’ Anton asked. We had all heard the noise but I was pretending I had not. It was a scream and the sounds of someone in pain as well as low gruff voices speaking with menace. It had come from a side alley between the huge buildings. Overturned waste bins lay everywhere. Rats as big as dogs scuttled away in panic, chittering to each other in their strange, sub-human language. They wanted no more to do with this than I did.

  A voice called out for someone to stop. I recognised it. So did the others. I could tell from the look on their faces. It belonged to old Citizen Chiltern, who lived on the same floor of our building with his sick wife. I looked at Ivan. Ivan looked at me. Anton’s head scanned from side to side as if he could not decide who he was going to look at. Without another word, Ivan strode into the alley, through the clouds of condensation vented through the grille of the sub-deck thermal system. Anton followed him.

  I glanced up and down the street. It had become suddenly and mysteriously empty. Windows were shuttered, doors slammed. I took a deep breath and followed my friends, much against my better judgement.

  Citizen Chiltern lay in the ash-tainted snow. Two large men in heavy overcoats were kicking him. Ivan already had his hands on the shoulders of one of them.

  ‘Stop,’ he said.

  The biggest man turned and looked at him. He had a broken nose and a face as pock-marked as the surface of a mining asteroid. ‘Go away, nadhead,’ he said. ‘This is none of your business.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Ivan said. ‘Leave Citizen Chiltern alone. I know him.’

  The big man reached out to shove Ivan away. Ivan’s left hand flicked out. It looked as if he had only stroked the big man’s face but the leg-breaker fell to the ground, blood erupting from his nose.

  ‘What the hell?’ said his companion.

  Ivan didn’t wait. His right hand hit the man in his stomach, doubling him over. Ivan’s knee came up to meet the bruiser’s descending chin. No sooner had the second man fallen than Anton was on him, hands round his throat, starting to bang his head on the snowy pavement. If I had not dragged him off, I have no doubt he would have carried on doing it until the leg-breaker’s skull was broken.

  It took all of my strength to restrain Anton, who seemed just as willing to fight with me as with the strangers. He was a skinny kid but wiry, and if I had not got the drop on him and held him from behind, things would have gone badly for me.

  Ivan just stood there, watchful but ready. His face was pale. It was starting to dawn on him what he had done. His punches had been reflexive. You don’t swing on a conditioned fighter like Ivan without getting that automatic response. I know that now myself, although it took months of hand-to-hand combat training to make me that way.

  The first of the leg-breakers was helping his friend to his feet. He turned and glared at us. ‘You boys are in trouble now,’ was all he said. I did not doubt it for a moment. His small eyes flickered.

  His gaze took in all of our faces as though memorising them, and instinctively I turned away. I tried to make it look as if I was getting ready to help Citizen Chiltern but really all I was doing was trying to escape notice.

  ‘If Leo lets me go, I’ll show you who is in trouble,’ shouted Anton. I cursed him under my breath for mentioning my name. The leg-breakers were already moving away up the alley. One of them was limping, the other clutching his head. Ivan stood there still as a statue, watching them vanish into the vented cloud. Anton raved threats. I told him to calm down. I might as well have ordered him to spread his arms and fly to the smaller moon for all the good it did. Once I was certain the thugs were long gone, I released Anton and bent down to help Citizen Chiltern up. Anton raced to the mouth of the alley, shouting. ‘That’s right, run!’

  I knew he was just compounding our mistake. Citizen Chiltern looked even older and slower than usual. His hair was lank. His face was bruised. One eye was already swollen shut. He moved painfully to his feet, trying to push himself up with his good hand.

  ‘You should not have done that, boys,’ he said. ‘Those were Cleaver’s men.’

  The words made my mouth go dry. All strength drained from my limbs. Ivan shrugged. I could tell he was thinking that it was too late to do anything about it now.

  ‘What do they want with you?’ I asked. ‘You’re nothing to Cleaver.’

  ‘I borrowed money from Little Tobey. My wife needed medicine and I haven’t worked since my hand got crushed in the pressing machine.’ The old man sounded almost apologetic. He looked guilty too, as if he was the
one who had been caught committing a crime. ‘You should have asked me,’ Ivan said. ‘I would have got it for you.’ If Ivan was capable of this, it was news to me. As far as I knew he was as broke as the rest of us.

  ‘I couldn’t do that, lad,’ said Citizen Chiltern. I didn’t need to ask why. He was too proud to beg from the people in his own building. Not too proud to visit our local loan shark, though. He glanced at me and something in my sour expression must have told him what I was thinking. ‘I already pawned everything I could,’ he said. Anton had returned now. He looked calmer. His face was a little pale. He had heard the bit about the leg-breakers being Cleaver’s men. ‘I’m not scared,’ he said although no one had said he was.

  ‘I am,’ said Ivan, ‘I’ve heard what Cleaver does to people who cross him.’

  We all had. Vivid images swum up through my mind. As fast as I forced them down, they found a new way to escape.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Citizen Chiltern. ‘Let’s get you home.’

  The old man looked at some broken alembics scattered on the ground nearby. He bent over again and began to pick up paper packets with alchemical runes on them.

  ‘Medicine,’ he said. ‘For my wife. She’s not very well.’

  ‘You did what?’ My father never raised his voice when he was angry. He just got quieter. His jaw grew tight and a small, savage smile twisted the corners of his lips upward. He looked as if he wanted to hit me again. I kept my hands up instinctively, ready to block any punch.

  ‘I did not mean to,’ I said, aware that I sounded like a child about to be punished, my voice high and thin as I strained to force the words out. I paused, took a breath and started again, pitching my voice lower this time and speaking as slowly and distinctively as my father did when he was angry. ‘The man swung at Ivan, Ivan hit him and then he hit the other one and then Anton jumped in. What was I supposed to do?’

  My father shook his head and made a small tut-tutting sound.

  He let out a long breath and looked at the ceiling. I knew he was counting to ten, and placing a short prayer to the Emperor between every number of the count. When he had finished, his hands were unclenched and he slumped down in the room’s one battered chair. He looked old and grey and tired in the one flickering gaslight of the small room.

  ‘They could have been armed,’ he said. ‘They could have been carrying…’

  My father knew about such things. The small income he made by doing odd-jobs around the Forgemarket was squandered on gambling at clip joints owned by Cleaver, or more rarely blown on binges in Cleaver’s gin palaces. In his youth, which he only ever talked about when he was very drunk, he had run with a gang. They had done some pretty wild things, if you believed his stories, which I did.

  ‘But they weren’t.’

  ‘You can bet the next bunch will be. And you won’t outnumber them either.’

  ‘I already worked that out for myself,’ I said. ‘You are not helping.’

  ‘Clever boy,’ he said. It was his customary sneer and a particularly stupid one, for he was a clever man himself. Maybe that was what made him bitter. There was no benefit to being clever in the bad alleys of the Forgemarket. It only left you aware of how trappy you were. ‘Always such a clever boy.’

  ‘What’s done is done,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’ It was the fatalism of the Forgemarket speaking. We had made one small stupid mistake, let our guards down for one fatal instant, stuck our noses into a place where they should not have been and we were going to have to pay for it. I knew it. My father knew. Ivan knew it. Possibly only Anton didn’t know it, and even he suspected. My father fell silent and stared at the small cold gas fire that did not heat our room. The gas had been cut off a few days before and I was not sure whether it was because he had gambled away the money to pay for it or it was simply one of the regular interruptions of service. They were becoming more and more common.

  A roach the size of my hand sauntered along the cluster of pipes that ran across the ceiling corner before vanishing through the hole in the wall where the pipes left our room and ran into the neighbours.

  I pulled my patched coat tighter around me and listened to the sounds of our building settling down to sleep. A dozen people were still outside waiting to use the shared lavatory. The babies in the room next door had finally stopped crying. My father got up and pulled his bed out of the wall. I lay down on the mat beside the cold fire and gazed up at the icon of Saint Aganostes that my mother had left. He was bowing down before the throne on which the Emperor lived out his death in life, a halo blazing around his head while the spirits of the primarchs looked down. I have since found out that it would be considered a heretical image by most of the Ecclesiarchy, but at the time it seemed to me to be the very incarnation of piety.

  Sleep was a long time coming. I lay shivering, not sure whether it was the winter chill or fear. My thoughts kept turning to the thing that my father kept in the locked box hidden below the creaky floor-blocks. I was wondering whether I was going to have to steal it.

  I suppose even then I had the beginnings of a plan. It gathered itself in the small dark corners of my mind, hiding there because it was too scary for me to contemplate openly yet.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Anton asked. He was not dancing around now. He was not squaring up to anybody. He looked as subdued as I had ever seen him and I realised then exactly how bad things were. Even Anton was frightened. People stared at us in the crowded vestibule. A few of them even looked at us admiringly. Word of what we had done had got around. That was bad. It meant Cleaver would have to do something. His power was based on fear. He could not be seen to he defied by anybody.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ivan. He was looking at me for some cue. I was the clever one. I was the one who was supposed to figure out how to make things right. I did not have the heart to tell him that I could not see any way out of this. I pushed through the great swing doors, wanting to get away from all of those accusing gazes. The cold slapped me in the face. My breath came out in great clouds I glanced around the street. It was the usual scene on a usual morning. Thousands of workers trudged through the polluted snow. The same giant figures of Imperial heroes looked down on us from every junction, statues carved in a richer age to celebrate the Guardsmen who had defended our world in the Imperium’s countless wars. A train whizzed past overhead, visible for a moment through the dirt-smeared plexiglass sides of the pneumatic tube along which it rushed. It all looked so normal. There was no sign that the world had changed. Whatever threats there were out there, they were not visible.

  Anton gestured at the giant recruiting poster pasted to the walls of the tenement. It showed a uniformed Guardsman staring heroically towards the distant horizon. If you are of a certain age and from Belial, you probably know it. At that time, they adorned every street. ‘We could join the Guard,’ Anton said. ‘Become Space Marines.’

  ‘Would you shut up about that?’ I said. Anton had been going on at us for years to join the Imperial Guard. It was his dream. He produced the book from a pocket in his overalls. It was tatty and dog eared and its cover was missing. He held it with the same reverence as people hold their prayer books in the cathedral. I suppose for him it was a sort of sacred object although, looking at it, most would only have seen a cheap propaganda novel of the sort the planetary government printed and distributed in millions. Anton must have read that book a hundred times. It was amazing. He could barely read a technical manual, his lips moved and he had to follow the ideograms with his finger, but he kept going back to that one stupid storybook.

  ‘No! We could join the Guard and we could become Space Marines. Cleaver would not dare touch us then.’

  I could see how much the idea appealed to him, to us all, I suppose if I am honest. He loved the idea that he could be transformed into someone else, someone powerful, someone who mattered. Being beyond the reach of the likes of Cleaver was as potent a dream as his head could hold without exploding.


  ‘And how are we supposed to achieve this before Cleaver’s boys find us?’ I sneered. I spoke so loudly that heads turned to look at us and a space cleared around. It was as if I had suddenly revealed we all had some vile contagious disease ‘Easy,’ said Anton. ‘We go to the recruiting office, sign the papers, and take the Emperor’s oath.’

  ‘What about our indentures to the Machine Guild?’ I asked. ‘They don’t like it if you break contract’

  ‘The Guard are always looking for volunteers and they ask no questions. They don’t care if you have a contract with the guild. They don’t care if you are wanted by the Arbites. And people say you do better if you step forward of your own free will and not wait for your number to come up in the Conscription Quota Lottery.’

  ‘He has a point, you know,’ said Ivan quietly.

  ‘Not you too,’ I said. ‘You want to go for a soldier?’

  ‘Why not? It beats waiting here to have our hands chopped off,’ Anton said.

  The entrance of the factory was coming closer. I could see the security guards with their guns and their badges standing beneath the huge, age-blurred statues of Industry and Production that flanked the iron railings of the gates. They made me feel a bit safer. Not even a maniac like Cleaver would do anything to us while we were at work. Messing with the Machine Guild was a death sentence even for the likes of him. They took the defence of their property and the free flow of their goods very seriously. Just ask the cultists who tried to start a union - if you can find them. Start your search at the bottom of the sump pools. That is where you will most likely find the bodies.

  I looked at them as I would look at any other pair of idiots who tried to talk me into signing my own death warrant. ‘Because it’s not like in Anton’s book.’ Even today I am quite proud of the amount of venom I managed to work into the word book. ‘In the Guard the Emperor’s enemies shoot at you with real bolter shells and real las-beams and no one survives those heroic last stands Anton likes to go on about.’