Liberation Day - Matthew Farrer Read online

  LIBERATION DAY

  Metthew Farrer

  One hundred and fifteen days to liberation

  Do not breathe.

  Do not move.

  The Emperor is my strength.

  Faith is my shield.

  By the Emperor’s Grace I will be saved.

  Here it comes…

  HE COULD SEE them through the cracked and rusted floor of the pipe. Flickering glow-globes and the lights of the camp threw an erratic yellow cast over green hide and rusted armour, and then over tusks and stiff bristles as the sentry’s pet beast began snorting and huffing the air for something it could not see.

  The Emperor is my salvation. Challis made his hands still, fought to calm himself.

  The yelping changed note and Challis realised it had worked. The rancid meat he had dropped behind the girder had confused the hound and buried his scent. He could hear footfalls again, but the greenskin and its bouncing, yapping hound had moved out of sight. Challis listened carefully, swiped sweat off his forehead. Twenty seconds went by with no returning steps, so he risked a quick crawl to where the pipe swung away from the wall and out over the hangar bay.

  Or what had once been a hangar bay. Now it was a slave stockade, bathed in crude arc lights and full of the crack of whips, brutish bellows of command and the cries of the hopeless. Challis allowed himself a moment of rage. Abominations of nature. No mercy. Then he shook his head and focused.

  With the sentry out on patrol the small greenskins left guarding the gate were screeching and squabbling and kicking one another’s shins. Clinging to the top of the pipe, Challis inched forward in the dimness, every movement agonisingly loud to his tension-sharpened ears. He was almost above the stockade wall now, close to the limit of the protective shadows. Now or never. With another glance at the brawling creatures he dropped from the pipe, rolled and ducked behind the smashed chassis of a wrecked vehicle he had seen the greenskins careening around the corridors in. Heart pounding, he wormed his way under the wreck and lay still as advancing footsteps and the yells of the returning sentry put paid to the fight by the gate.

  They had not spotted him. He allowed himself a grin. Unnoticed and in one piece, he was inside the slave camp.

  Now, the trick of getting out again would be far more difficult.

  CHALLIS HAD NEVER been this far into the bay before, but he had studied the place from every perch he could find in the hangar ceiling and now he unrolled a mental map with practised ease. The beasts had ignored the maze of corridors and compartments in the decks and simply built a sprawl of shacks and hovels on the hangar floor as they would have on an open plain. Challis could even see a new one going up: in the middle distance a greenskin had bolted a frame together and was fixing rough metal plates to it, driving the rivets home with well-aimed blows of its forehead.

  The layout was crude, but it had made the camp easy to scout. I’m… he glanced around… on the south side, so the slave pens should be… he squinted, there.

  Slave pits would have been a better term. Huge holes had been blasted out of the deck, roofed over with tangles of wire and metal and the slaves thrown in with whatever clothes they had on their backs. Many were nearly naked from months of squalor and floggings, emaciated and broken-spirited.

  There were greenskins on guard here, and Challis had to stay flat to the deck as he worked around the perimeter. There! A burning device the greenskins used to make the holes was still set up. That meant a new pit, dug for fresh slaves.

  He snaked forward to see in. The slaves looked new indeed and were numerous - at least forty or fifty of them - barely wounded and most of their clothing intact. Those would be the ones. The others were as good as dead already. Back in the shadows, he slipped back towards the only shed that the greenskins kept locked.

  A gap low in one wall let him crawl in, and his guess had been right - it was the ammunition store. Enough light came in through the rickety roof to make out piles of crude ammo clips, boxes of bombs, battered jerry cans of what smelled like flamer fuel. Challis tugged on a cord about his neck, pulling out the little handheld igniter he had stolen two days before. Looped at his belt was a length of tough, ropy creeper he had found could work as a wick. One end went into the valve on one of the fuel-cans, and after a couple of tries he got a puff of yellow flame out of the igniter and set the dried creeper to smouldering. Adrenaline made his stomach lurch as he wriggled back out of the shed and scuttled for cover. You’re going soft, he told himself, too used to fancy charges with amulet-clocks to time them and—

  The wick burned faster than he’d expected - there must have been vapour from the fuel-cans in the air. The blast thundered all across the hangar, and Challis fled for cover to a string of booms and cracks as the other munitions blew apart. All around greenskins bellowed to each other and charged towards the flames.

  Except one by the slave pen, looking distractedly at the fire engulfing the centre of the camp. Its back was to the mound of solidified slag left from the pit’s digging.

  Challis ran up the slagpile pulling two heavy black-bladed knives from his belt. A leap took him onto the beast’s broad shoulders, sending it staggering. A second later both blades sank into its neck, cutting its bellows of protest to strangled gurgles. Challis vaulted clear as it staggered away, trying to hold its head on, and ran to the rim of the pit. Staring up at him in the brightening firelight, the slaves looked aghast.

  ‘Who are you?’ one haggard face demanded.

  ‘No time! Let’s go!’ Challis began pulling the spiked roof-bars aside. ‘You, the big one. Grab its weapon. You two grab those spanners. The rest of you, here.’ A moment more and they began to scramble out.

  Getting the slaves out by the route he had come in was out of the question, but he had scouted a path back from the main south entrance too. Its arch came into view between the shacks as they ran, gates hanging open but four more huge greenskins were on guard.

  Challis made a quick count. About eight slaves per guard, about half of them with stakes, spanners or whatever they had grabbed on their way out of the pit. Not the best odds, but it would have to do. No time to go looking for more tools or bodies to strip.

  ‘Right,’ Challis hissed, ‘we go through that gate. Anyone here fight before?’

  The hulking slave who’d taken the pit guard’s cleaver raised his hand, another half-dozen behind him. Challis sheathed one of his knives and pulled a battered laspistol from his knapsack.

  ‘The rest of you follow the armed people in. When I say go, you go! Any of you that can run past, do it! Don’t play hero. Once we’re past the gate keep heading along the corridor south. After a couple hundred paces you’ll reach a fork. Take the left. When you reach the old torpedo gantry, jump down into the large ventilation pipe. It will drop you a few decks down near a waste reclamation plant. Go into the storage cells at the back and wait. Save any questions for after we’re out.’ He primed his laspistol.

  ‘Emperor bless us,’ whispered one of the slaves.

  ‘We pray that He will,’ Challis joined the rest of them in the reply. Then: ‘GO!’

  Running, Challis dropped the first guard with a frantic point-blank headshot. A burst of yellow gunfire in the gloom and two slaves convulsed and flew backward. The big man swung his cleaver down, forcing his target to parry as the other two were mobbed by slaves. Challis ducked low to avoid the sweep of an axe that took the head off the slave to his left.

  One guard went down, but there were humans dead underfoot too. Challis shouted at them to go through and bodies raced past him.

  The big slave and the guard were still locked together as another guard fell to a wild shovel swing. The last howled with rage as t
he slaves slipped past them. Challis thrust his knife but was knocked backwards - winded, he looked around and saw more charging towards the gate, while in the distance came the cough and roar of engines. And the last damned guard would not die.

  Then the big slave lunged, turning his weapon at the last moment to bypass the guard’s counter swing and sink the blade deep into its shoulder, severing its arm and splitting its body. It fell to the deck, bisected and swearing.

  ‘We’ve got to go NOW!’ Challis shouted. A shell whined over their heads.

  The big man looked past him and saw what was coming. He gave Challis a sombre grin and hefted the cleaver.

  ‘You go. I’ll hold ‘em.’

  Challis bit his lip. The slave’s bravery was humbling. He gave a nod.

  ‘The Emperor will welcome your soul.’

  ‘I gladly give it. Go on.’

  Challis turned and ran.

  Behind him there was a cry of ‘‘For the Emperor!’’ against the roars of enemy, then he was into the south corridor. The left fork. The torpedo gantry. He paused at the lip of the pipe, hoping against hope to hear another human shout from behind him, but there was nothing but the inhuman babble of the greenskins and the revving of engines. Challis turned and dived into the dark.

  ‘YOU’RE GOING TO have to talk to them before long.’ It was one of the women, whippet-lean and green-eyed. ‘One or two of them are about ready to drop, and another couple are about ready to fight each other.’ Challis shook his head.

  ‘We keep moving. They were stirred up already, prowling all over the hulk from half a dozen camps, and this will make it worse.’

  They had come to a joist, torn from the ceiling and blocking most of the passage. The slaves crawled under it one by one, stiff and gasping. Challis swung deftly under it by one hand. When he stood up on the far side the woman was watching him still.

  ‘You’ve been this way before. You know this passage. Do you know where we’re going?’ He shooed them into motion again before he answered.

  ‘I came this way when I started scouting the slave pens. I’ve been along here a few times. And it’s a lot like home.’

  ‘Home?’ Brighter light was filtering in from somewhere through rents in the walls, enough for her to see him more clearly. His hair and beard were iron-grey, his features grizzled, but Challis’s skin was pearl-white, almost transparent.

  ‘You’re a hive-worlder. A down-hiver, at that.’ She found the spirit to grin. ‘I don’t wonder you’ve learned your way around. You’re in your element here.’ He snorted and called ahead.

  ‘Wait. See that spot where the metal’s ripped? There’s some lichen leaves dropped next to it as a marker. That’s the one. Through there.’ He turned at a tap on his shoulder; the woman had her hand out.

  ‘I’m Hyl. Thank you for coming in for us.’ His expression softened a little and he took her forearm in his old gangers’ greeting.

  ‘Challis. Pleased to have you along.’

  The crawlspace was an old corridor, crushed to a narrow metal slot and tough to negotiate. It was twenty minutes before they had all passed through to stand on a mesh platform over a giant shaft that blew chilly air up at them. The going was easier here and Hyl soon had breath to talk again.

  ‘I was taken from a ship that this hulk almost hit while we were in the Immaterium. The Cezarro’s Dreaming. Bonded trader. My father was the chief steward to the guild household. We both dropped into real space and they sent boats out to board us. What world are you from? I didn’t realise this thing was big enough to take a planet.’

  ‘Vanaheim. Noatun Hive.’

  Her expression changed. ‘So Vanaheim’s fallen? Throne of Earth, how many of those creatures are there on this thing?’

  ‘Fallen I don’t know about. This piece of trash somehow made it practically into orbit before any of the misbegotten bastards up-hive thought to check their scopes.’

  ‘You’re a ganger?’

  ‘Not for a few years.’ Challis tapped a tarnished silver stud on his tunic. ‘Section Commander, Fourth Division, House Skadi Integrated Militia. They dropped onto the hive and broke in at the shoreline. When we started putting up a good fight at the breaches, they dropped a chunk of rock into the sea just outside and sent a wave in that flooded the lower levels. Then they came back in and scooped us up. That’s when they got my team. I don’t know what happened after that.’

  They fell silent as the group scrambled through a gully where the deck was wrenched up at a right angle. At the top of the slope Challis took them into a sloping tunnel full of metal flanges that Hyl realised after a moment were stairs - they were walking down one wall of a stairwell that was on its side. Several slaves were crying with exhaustion now; pulling, cajoling, and carrying one another, they scrambled to the end, crowded into the bottom of the well where a corridor soared straight up over their heads. Challis lit a torch from his igniter and the others flinched away from the sudden glow.

  ‘Listen, now. Not far. Beyond this we’ll be safe from any greenskins, even if the breakout stirred them up more than I think it did. But you’re going to need to be careful. All of you get a torch from that pile. Good. There are some spares, get one in each hand if you can. Get them all lit. I made them to be used, I don’t want to have wasted my time.’

  He stood in a circle of torchlight.

  ‘Listen well. Be quiet and careful. Watch one another’s backs. Any movement, keep a flame between you and it and make sure people around you know you saw it.’ He stepped back and reached into the tangle of metal wedged across a door that was tilted into a sideways slot. Hyl realised it was a barricade, lashed and riveted across the door and covered with a brutish alien scrawl, but Challis gripped a couple of struts that looked like all the others, slid them aside and vanished through the hole. Warm, musty air came out of the opening.

  Hyl looked around as the others shuffled and looked fearfully at the opening. No one moved.

  ‘The hell with you all, then,’ she told them, and clambered through the opening with her torch out in front of her. On the other side, Challis watched her stand up, they watched the first of the slaves follow her through and grinned.

  One hundred and twelve days to liberation

  ‘WHAT DID YOU mean when we first broke out, when you talked about them all getting stirred up?’ Hyl asked.

  They were sitting in a dim oubliette behind a hatch that still closed. Their first torches had long since burned down, but Challis had pointed them to a stockpile of replacements and to a fire pit he had made in the hollow of two vent-pipes. The slaves were slurping water from a channel low in the floor and chewing on a bitter lichen that Challis had told them was edible.

  ‘The greenskins? It’s how they get when there’s a fight in the air. There hasn’t been as much squabbling between them as usual, but they still seem to get wind of a fight or a hunt a lot faster when they’re bored. I wish I knew how they know when things like this are happening.’

  ‘We think it might be mind-to-mind, sir.’

  Challis and Hyl looked around at a slim boy, not more than twenty, the grubby remains of an Adeptus apprentice’s braid hanging at the side of his head. He spoke nervously, as if he was unaccustomed to speaking to groups.

  ‘We think they can talk to each others’ minds like astropaths can. Ideas, feelings, they can… sort of ripple through large groups of them. It’s how they can make armies so fast. And how they can get excited and wanting to hunt even before they actually hear the news that a group of slaves have escaped.’

  ‘An astra-what?’ said Challis. ‘Talk sense, boy.’

  ‘Sounds like witchcraft to me,’ Hyl said, and made an uneasy face. Challis shot her a look, equal parts annoyance and confusion, until she noticed it and explained. ‘My father’s ship had its contingent of witch-workers - they let starships steer, see where they’re going, talk to other ships and planets. But I never knew greenskins had their own.’

  Challis scowled at his own ignoranc
e for a moment more then shrugged. Hyl was just realising that Challis had likely never even seen a space ship when he snapped his fingers and made her jump.

  ‘That would explain it.’ Both the boy and Hyl looked at him quizzically.

  ‘I found a chamber near the outer hulk when I was first finding my way around,’ he explained. ‘Dozens of greenskins, scores, all chained together and filling the air with lightning. I saw one or two wyrds in the hive sumps back home, and they made my guts crawl in exactly the same way.’

  The boy nodded in sudden excitement at Challis’s description. ‘Yes, the mutant offshoot! Psychics! We knew they must exist, but we never learned much about what kind of work they do. But what you are saying, sir and madam, it fits well.’

  For the first time Challis took a moment to look the boy properly up and down. Had he had choices he wouldn’t have saved this one - too thin, too frail-looking, scholar’s stoop. But on the other hand…

  ‘Fits, does it? Your name? And you know all this how?’ The boy straightened a little.

  ‘Korland, sir. I was apprenticed to the household of Magos Biologis Emmanael Cort on Othera. I was compiling my journeyman’s thesis on orkoid behaviour, sir.’

  ‘Orkoid?’ Challis asked. He looked at Hyl but she just shook her head and shrugged.

  ‘Orks, sir. That is the proper name for the greenskins. ‘‘Ork’’.’

  Challis spat onto the deck. ‘The bastard greenskins don’t deserve a proper name!’ The other slaves looked over then cringed away from the sudden boom in Challis’s voice and Korland seemed to shrink visibly. Hyl broke the tension and clapped the boy on the shoulder.

  ‘Oh, the irony, eh, Korland?’ she said drily. ‘Bet you didn’t expect to be studying them from this close to hand.’

  Korland hazarded a short laugh, and when Challis simply snorted he started to talk again.

  ‘We were planning to pick up some of the creatures left behind on worlds they attacked. We got too far ahead and arrived at Vanaheim while the hulk was in orbit. One of their ships crippled our engines as we tried to get clear and their boats took some of us before the ship fell into the atmosphere.’