Gone for a Soldier - William King Read online

‘How would you know?’ Anton asked. ‘Have you ever been at one?’

  It was a fair question and he was asking it honestly. ‘Have you ever met anybody who survived one?’

  Anton shrugged. ‘They are all off-planet. Or they are Space Marines.’

  He said that the way he would have said they had gone to heaven.

  ‘Open your eyes, Anton,’ I said. ‘Where do you think the limbless beggars you see on every street comer come from? Where do you think Harry No-Legs mislaid his kneecaps? And they are the lucky ones. Ask them! I have.’

  ‘So you like to talk to beggars who can tell a good story,’ Anton said.

  ‘And you like to read idiotic prop-novs,’ I said. ‘No - let me rephrase that - the same idiotic prop-nov over and over again.’

  ‘It’s not idiotic,’ Anton said. He sounded genuinely hurt but I was too angry and too scared to feel much guilt. The masked guards looked at us and we punched in. Under their hard stares we fell silent and suited up and got to work at the sirens’ first blast.

  We donned our heavy rhino-beetle carapace work clothes, our metal masks with their crystal visors and huge insulated gauntlets, and strode out onto the oil-stained floor of the factory. Back then it was the Great Pre-Macharian Depression. The machines upon which Belial’s industry depended were running down from lack of off-world parts. We were reduced to hand-crafting servo-mechanisms to replace them, not all of which functioned as they should. We did our best to duplicate the products of men who had known what they were doing on a distant planet hundreds of years before. The results, as you might imagine, were not very good. Machines that had, according to my father, worked unceasingly for centuries needed to be repaired every few weeks and there were so many of them that we were kept constantly busy at our work benches beneath the great flame-belching blast furnaces.

  We worked amid the clatter and boom of the great factory. It left us too much time with our own dark thoughts.

  It did not take long for Cleaver to track us down. They came after our double shift at the factory finished. We were walking across Stormspike Span when a massive groundcar swung up beside us and a dozen big men leapt out. Before we knew it the three of us were pinned against the wall of the bridge, a thousand-foot drop behind us, held in grips that not even Ivan could break. I looked around and again the street had mysteriously emptied.

  Only then did Little Tobey get out of the groundcar. He was shorter than his men, broader and heavier, and not all of that was fat. He had the face of an overweight bird of prey - huge jowls, hooked nose, cold, flinty eyes. A fine fur of hair covered his bullet head. He looked at us with an expression that I found merely frightening because I did not then understand it. I do now. It was the look of a very, very hard man sent to do a job that embarrassed him and that he did not really want.

  He punched the palm of his left hand with the fist of his right. It made the sound of a face being slapped very hard. It was somehow more frightening than if he really had slapped one of us. There was a sense of restraint, of controlled violence about it. He was letting us know what he could do, rather than doing it.

  ‘Well, boys,’ he said, ‘you’ve caused me a little problem.’ His voice was a low growl. You had to strain to hear him and you did because you knew that if you missed what he had to say something terrible might happen. It was an effective trick. I’ve known commissars since who used the same one but none of them did it better than Little Tobey. He would have made a fine commissar.

  The flinty eyes sized us up. He wanted us to be in no doubt that he was a man who solved the little problems that came his way. None of us said anything. I would have apologised but my mouth was too dry to get the words out. I wriggled a little but the heavy hands holding me in place pushed me back against the wall with irresistible force.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have. You interfered with a collection and you embarrassed a couple of my boys.’

  I looked around to see if I could see the men Ivan had dropped. They were not there. Little Tobey was a good enough manager to make sure of that. If they had been, tempers would have run high and things might have got out of control, and he was not a man who liked to have that happen.

  He walked up and down in front of us and looked at each of us in turn. Anton and Ivan met his gaze. I struggled to hold it for a few heartbeats and then looked away. Tobey shook his head with theatrical sadness. He was close enough that I could smell the wave of cologne displaced through the air.

  ‘What am I going to do with you three?’ he asked with the air of a parent confronting wayward children. He exhaled and his breath formed a small cloud in the cold air. He took out a tube of violet-scented breath-fresheners and popped half the roll into his mouth, crunching them with his metal teeth. It should have been ridiculous. Instead it was terrifying, like watching a great carnivore nibble a morsel of flesh while it considers eating you.

  ‘I hear you are a fighter,’ he said. A sausage-like finger jabbed out at Ivan’s chest.

  Ivan nodded.

  ‘It’s a hard thing to fight when you’ve had your hand fed into a meat-grinding machine.’

  There was nothing anybody could say to that. We all knew he was not discussing a fanciful situation. ‘My boss likes to do that. I mean he enjoys it. It gives him real pleasure,’ Little Tobey said. He sounded thoughtful now, as a man is likely to be when considering the foibles of an employer. ‘If I took the three of you to him now, what do you think he would do to you all?’

  He looked at us all again, giving us ample chance to consider the answer. After a silence that went on for far too long he said, ‘I think we all know the answer.’

  It dawned on me that he had only asked the question because he did not intend to do that. Looking at the others I could see I was the only one who realised this.

  ‘What… what are you going to do?’ It took me a huge effort to force the words out. The fact the effort was visible made me feel humiliated and I think planted small seeds of murder in my heart. I became aware that along with the fear, somewhere, buried very deep was a burning rage I suspected the two were related.

  ‘I was told you were quick,’ said Tobey. ‘Seems I was told right. Here’s how it is… You made some of my boys look bad. But you’re quick, likely lads - hard too - and I would hate to see that talent go to waste. You collect the money for me from Chiltern and I will see what I can do with the Cleaver. And when I say ‘collect’ I mean make an example of. I want them dropped down a lift-shaft. Chiltern and his wife. Do it and we’ll talk. Don’t and…’ He raised his right arm. He had withdrawn his hand into his sleeve of his very fine coat so it was no longer visible. It looked like he was clowning. Nobody laughed. ‘You’ve got till tomorrow morning.’

  He clapped his hands. His boys let us go and before we had time to react, they had withdrawn into the big groundcar and swept away. Ivan stood there shaking his head. Anton was throwing up into the snow. I stood and watched the groundcar sweep off. I knew that it was taking my whole future with it.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Anton asked. He was paler than the tainted snow. We stood in the vestibule of the tenement. It was warmer than my apartment would be and I did not want my father to overhear this discussion. If he was even there, which was not at all certain.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘We could be part of Cleaver’s gang,’ Anton said. I could see he was turning the idea over in his mind and that it appealed to some part of him.

  ‘You going to be the one to drop old Chiltern and his missus down the elevator shaft?’ Ivan asked. ‘I’m not.’

  He had a deep stubborn streak in him, even as a boy. Some might have said a self-destructive one too. I am in two minds about that myself.

  ‘It’s them or us,’ said Anton. He was trying to sound vicious but he ended up sounding merely pathetic.

  ‘You think a Space Marine would do that?’ Ivan asked.

  Anton looked ashamed.

  ‘We’re not going to get to be part o
f the Cleaver’s mob, idiot boy,’ I said. That got both of their attentions.

  ‘You’ve already worked it out, have you?’ Anton asked. He sounded like my father accusing me of being a clever boy.

  ‘It’s not about recruiting us. It’s about power. It’s about them showing they can make us do what they want.’

  ‘Well, they can, can’t they?’ Anton said.

  ‘Look, we do over Chiltern and his wife and we’ve done a first-degree murder. They don’t have to kill us. They can hand us over to the Arbites and they’ll execute us for them.’

  Even as I said the words I knew I was right. It was brilliant in its way. The long arm of the law would be seen to do Cleaver’s work for him. It would make it look as if the judges were in collusion with the gangs, and everyone would be even more afraid of going to the law than they were now.

  ‘If we don’t,’ Anton said. He raised his arm with the hand withdrawn into the sleeve just as Tobey had done. ‘It might be better.’

  ‘I’m not doing it,’ Ivan said.

  ‘Simple as that?’ I said. To tell the truth, I admired him more than I could find the words to say in that moment. I resented him just as much. That’s the way with heroes. They really rub your nose in your own inadequacy. It was all very easy for him.

  ‘Simple as that,’ he said. ‘Good night.’

  He turned on his heel and walked away towards the tiny apartment he shared with his aunt and his cousins. Anton looked at me. There was a shifty expression on his face. His hands were balled up tight, his shoulders hunched forward. Something cold glittered in his eyes.

  ‘Well, Leo,’ he said, ‘it looks like it’s up to you and me.’

  We banged on the door of Chilterns’ apartment and heard the old man’s slow shuffling steps coming closer through the thin plas-fibre. Anton looked at me, a tight grin pasted on his mouth, his eyes narrowed, his pupils pin-sharp. I heard Chiltern breathing as he put his eye to the security-socket and inspected us. A moment later, chains rattled and the door opened.

  ‘It’s you boys,’ he said. The relief in his voice was evident. All of us knew who he was expecting. ‘Come in, citizens.’

  We did, and a bunch of people passing on the way to their own chambers saw us do it. Whatever happened, they would remember. There would be witnesses for the Arbites to question.

  Chiltern’s wife lay on a bed, wrapped in blankets that had the sickly sweet smell of age and illness and death. An old mechanical clock, obviously their most treasured possession, ticked the hours and minutes of the old woman’s dying loudly away in the corner. The old man turned his back on us. Anton nudged me with his elbow. I don’t know what he expected me to do - produce a cosh and bludgeon the old man on the back of the head perhaps.

  ‘It’s Anton and Leo, dear,’ Old Chiltern said. ‘Two of the boys who helped me last night. I was telling you about them.’

  The old woman raised herself painfully up on her elbow and blinked at us. Her breathing was raspy and loud. It sounded like her lungs were filled with phlegm. The thought sauntered sideways into my head that she did not have much time left anyway.

  It would be a mercy to put her out of her misery.

  ‘You boys are very brave,’ she said. ‘Fighting off those robbers like that.’

  So Chiltern had not told her who the robbers really were or why they were attacking him. He stared at us with entreaty in his eyes, silently pleading for us not to share the information. He wanted her to die in peace. I gave a slight nod. He looked pathetically grateful. I hated him in that moment for being so weak and so kind and so thoughtful.

  Chiltern had made his way over to the corner where the sink and an ancient cooking burner stood. A small loaf of bread and a carton of protein paste was on a plate. There was one small chipped cup. He picked up the bread and paste, brought it over, and handed it to Anton. For a moment, I feared he would brain the old man with it. Chiltern went back and got his glass. There was some murky cold tea in it. ‘It’s not much but it’s all we can offer you,’ he said.

  Anton’s face wore a ghastly grin now and he kept nodding and winking at me. I realised that confronted with the reality of dragging this pair of geriatrics to the lift shaft and tossing them down, he was stumped. He could not bring himself to do it. He wanted me to.

  ‘What do you boys want?’ Chiltern asked. He obviously had picked up something of the strangeness of the situation. There was a worried note in his voice. ‘You’re not in any trouble, are you?’

  And if we were what could you do about it, old man? I wanted to ask. Instead I said, ‘We just wanted to make sure you were all right.’ I was surprised at how smoothly the lie came out. Somewhere, somehow, a decision had been made. The cold little monster that had come up with my plan was getting ready to step out of the shadows.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Anton. ‘That’s what we wanted. We brought you some food.’ He produced an old paper package of sweets from his pocket and tried to thrust them at the old man, who refused.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, boys,’ the old lady said. ‘But we don’t need anything, do we, Albert?’

  The old man nodded. We stood there in uncomfortable silence for a few moments and then I said, ‘Well then, we had best be going.’

  ‘Come again, any time, boys,’ they said in unison and then laughed. I knew that the next knock on the door they got would not be coming from us. Old Man Chiltern knew it too. Maybe he even understood the real reason why we had come. As he saw us out he said, ‘I am grateful lads, for everything.’

  Or maybe that is just my imagination. ‘Good night, citizen,’ I said.

  ‘That could have gone better,’ said Anton as we stood beneath the flickering gaslight in the corridor again.

  ‘No it couldn’t have,’ I said. ‘It went just fine.’

  ‘You have a plan?’

  ‘Go home, pack your stuff,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow we go to the recruiting office.’

  He let out a long whoop. He looked as pleased as if I had told him we were off for a night at the penny theatre followed by a session at Mama Kraven’s Kathouse. Anton raced off delighted, without even saying goodnight.

  I made my way back to our own apartment. I had a suspicion that things were not going to work out quite that smoothly. They never did in the Forgemarket.

  My father was not in when I got home. Doubtless he was out on a spree. It was his usual response to a crisis. In a way it made me sad - I was not going to get a chance to say goodbye before I left forever. He was my one piece of blood kin and whatever else he was, he was my father. In a way, I was glad too, for it made what I was going to do easier. I found the hidden key taped to the underside of the chair. I went over to the loose block of plascrete in the floor and levered it up. Much to my relief the box was where my father had left it I opened it with the key and took out the contents, which were wrapped in protective oilcloth.

  I unwrapped it slowly and carefully just as I had seen him do when I was a little boy and he thought I was asleep. It was an old laspistol, the weapon my father had carried in his gang-boy youth. The metal felt heavy and cold as death in my hand. My fingers closed on the grip and I raised it to eye-level and sighted along it, just as you see small boys do when they are playing orks and Guardsmen in the street. The difference was that I held a real gun in my hand for the first time in my life. It made me feel strong yet at the same time vulnerable and crazy. I had this odd feeling like I could not trust myself with it, that I might do something mad, like those killers who go on murder sprees in the Underhive warrens.

  Just feeling the trigger under my finger made my heart beat faster and my breathing shallow. I could imagine getting Little Tobey or the pock-faced leg-breaker in my sights and burning them down where they stood.

  I laughed softly. The gun was old and I did not even know if it would work. I hit the small circular button near my thumb. The weapon vibrated slightly. An indicator on the back of the handle blinked green, indicating the power cell still hel
d a charge. I knew all that from reading prop-novs, just as I knew what to do next. If it seems unusual to you that an untrained boy could get a gun to work so easily, just remember, those weapons were designed to be used by unlettered farm boys and the dregs of the Imperium’s slums, or so a tech-priest once told me.

  I ran my thumb over the power dial, moving it to the lowest setting. The roach was back. I took aim at it and pulled the trigger. I missed but the low intensity beam illuminated the room and scorched the piping. I moved it after the roach as it scuttled to escape death. The beam hit it and it burned, carapace exploding as its innards super-heated.

  So the gun worked. I switched it off and put it inside my coat. I put the box back in its usual place and placed the plascrete block back on top of it I did not want my father stumbling over it if he came back drunk.

  As it turned out there was no need to worry. He did not come back that night. Somehow, I managed to get some fitful sleep on the cold floor. When I woke it was dawn, time to be up and going. I packed my stuff and paused at the door to take one last look at the apartment. I suppose I knew I was never going to see it again. It was a strange feeling. I had lived all of my life up till that point in this one small cramped room and I did not like the idea of leaving my father without any idea of where I had gone. I did not know what to do. I had neither paper nor stylus to leave a message. I stood for a second undecided, lasgun weighing down my coat, half-empty duffel bag hanging from the other, then I knew what I had to do. I raised the weapon and burned my farewell onto the wall then I put the gun into my coat’s deep pocket. I stepped through the door and locked it behind me and walked out into the corridor, certain I would never return.

  Anton and Ivan were in the vestibule of the tenement. They too had half-empty kitbags. In the wan gas light there was something waxen about their faces and odd in their expressions. They did not look quite real. They looked nervous and very young.

  ‘We are really going to do this?’ Ivan said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Anton let out a long whoop. We stepped through the doors. The big groundcar was there, and Little Tobey and a dozen of his bruisers. This time the two men Ivan had hit were with them. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach but I kept a smile plastered on my face.