CHAPTER THREE

Pierod hated Serrine’s void port. The structure was a rarity on the planet: functional, rather than fashionable, built from bare ferrocrete and decorated with few of the statues, frescoes, or ornamental parks that were common in the wider overcity. This was in part due to its age – its creation from STC was referenced in the planet’s dustiest collections of millennia-old prophecies and proclamations – and in part due to its function.

As a designated agri world, responsible for producing a drug vital in some of the more forceful rejuvenat treatments, Serrine had played host to a vast collection of ships since its reintroduction to the Imperium. These ships would arrive in the skies above the planet every month, their schedule as reliable as the Astronomican, before disgorging a fleet of big-bellied ferry craft. The ferries, themselves larger than even the planetary governor’s personal frigate, settled their huge hulls down in Serrine’s void port just long enough to be pumped full of precious liquid cargo before lifting off again.

This bounty had given the planet power and influence in the Imperium, and meant that his father could pull strings as far away as Terra. Pierod had never let the other boys in the scholam forget it. He had wielded that influence to convince Ysaac, two years his junior, to forge the numeracy tests required for him to take his current position, on pain of being taken away by the Adeptus Astartes. When Ysaac grew wiser and that threat lost its teeth, he turned to bribery instead, offering rare goods from his father’s visits to the Throneworld, as well as the promise of a good word in the ear of some high-up Administratum major-domo. That good word would never be uttered, but Pierod didn’t care by then; he’d played the game, passed the tests, and was in theory set up for a life as comfortable as his father’s.

But then came the opening of the Great Rift, and life on Serrine changed. The collection ships had stopped coming when he was a young man, their bulk replaced in the sky by a yawning scar, red raw and painful to look at. It was a decade before the next ship arrived, and when it did, it hung in orbit for a week, silent, before the decision was made to send a scouting party from the planet’s surface to investigate the craft. They never returned, but rumour had it that they managed a few garbled transmissions before their communications were cut, gibbering descriptions of hunched, half-human monsters, and the debris of a devolved society that suggested years lost in the warp.

After that, the collection ships simply stopped coming. Serrine, a world built and maintained solely for the growth and harvest of a single drug, continued its routine of growth and harvest regardless, society too calcified to shift to a new reality.

In his position as a government functionary, Pierod had seen the stockpiles of Solipsus sap – vast tankers of spilled and spoiled purple liquid, sequestered in the darkest corners of the overcity so as not to spook the wider populace. They represented Serrine’s loss: loss of millennia of purpose, loss of contact with the wider Imperium, and – worst of all for Pierod – loss of prestige in the galaxy. So he had come up with an effective way of managing the problem, a luxury for a man used to luxury: he simply wouldn’t think about it.

Serrine’s former wealth meant the planet had been blessed with food supplies and water purification facilities. For Pierod and the other families that made up Serrine’s complicated web of noble houses, major and minor, change was anathema. If the grass kept growing and the harvest kept coming, then Pierod could live out his lifespan – artificially extended through rejuvenat treatments, of course – in the fashion his noble birth demanded. And that certainly didn’t include running.

He could still feel his heartbeat in his throat, thick and unsteady. He swallowed to chase it back down into the meat of his body, and prised the tunnel’s exit hatch open a crack. His pink face pressed close to the cold metal of the hatch, he risked a look outside.

The void port was even more hideous than it was before, he thought with resigned sadness. Pierod had tried to convince himself there had been beauty in its brutalism, the perfectly flat grey surface stretching out like a calm, man-made ocean. Now it was marred with gouges and divots, lumps and bumps. Taken as a whole, the void port reminded him of Ysaac’s teenage face, the ravages of adulthood pockmarking something that had once been unblemished (but still terribly dull).

The largest of these disfigurements were huge cylinders – the remnants of elevator shafts that had once been used to move Solipsus sap onto the vast loader ships. Three still stood on the horizon, but the others lay across the void port like toppled trees, their trunks creating makeshift corridors and barricades where previously there was open space.

The smaller bundles were bodies, he realised with horror, clad in the pale pink robes of Serrine’s militia. They lay alone, or in groups of two or three. They appeared to have been shot in the back as they ran, their weapons lying in front of them as if thrown from their hands towards the huge, square building that served as the void port’s central command tower.

That was not good. Serrine could always provide more militiamen – the death toll wasn’t the issue – but if the void port garrison had been routed, Pierod thought, then there would be nobody to protect him.

Who was responsible for this attack, anyway? Off-worlders, jealous of their fortune? Filthy xenos, come to befoul the most civilised society in the galaxy? He’d heard tales told of such things in the plush council smoking houses. Or, infinitely more likely, was this the work of another house attempting to put itself in the ascendancy?

If it was, then it was a grander affair than he was used to. Such coup attempts came around every few years, and things usually worked themselves out with a handful of palace scuffles, a few jewelled knives buried in a few noble backs, and a subtle rearrangement of the lines of succession. They didn’t tend to wheel out the heavy artillery.

For now, the point was moot. There were people killing other people, and while he didn’t know if the void port tower still held, he certainly wasn’t getting off-world hiding in this tunnel like some kind of common rat.

Breath slowly returning to his lungs, he steeled himself and poked his head out of the hatch, preparing to run again.

He ducked backwards just in time as three figures sprinted past, close enough that he could see the worn tread on their identical boots. They were clad in grubby overalls that were once white, but now stained with an array of browns, blacks and purples. All three figures had the telltale pastel-pink skin of the undercity’s denizens.

‘Refinery workers?’ Pierod questioned aloud. ‘What are they doing up here?’

As vice treasurer, he had dealt with beings – he preferred not to use the word ‘people’ – who lived below the haze line before, but only in the structured confines of the cabinet. He never liked these meetings to go on for more than a few minutes, leaving any subsequent discussion on harvest dates, thresher machine repair, or pay outs to family members lost in the grass for his subordinates to handle. They had a peculiar smell, these undercity dwellers, one that wrinkled Pierod’s nose and offended his delicate sensibilities.

As he watched, two of the three figures wrestled a long cannon from the ground, mounting it on a tripod set up by the third against a chunk of broken ferrocrete. A belt of ammunition was hefted into the firing chamber, and the third worker aimed the weapon across the void port towards the central tower, squeezing the trigger as the barrel swung into alignment.

The weapon spat light and sound, and Pierod flinched, ducking back away from the cacophony.

‘Throne!’ he hissed. He pulled the hatch almost closed, leaving only a slit open as the mounted cannon rattled through its first full belt of ammunition.

Fire lanced back from the direction of the tower as the gun wound down, the telltale fizz of las-bolts superheating the air. They slapped into the ferrocrete barricade, scoring small, uniform holes into the blackened masonry. That was good, at least, Pierod thought. That meant Serrine’s militia were still in this fight, and when they were confronted with a better, they would put their lives on the line to get him off this world.

Their backs against the ferrocrete, the workers rooted around in ragged sackcloth bags, pulling out ribbons of ammunition and boxy magazines like intestines and organs from fabric corpses.

As soon as the fusillade slowed, they were up, one feeding the mounted gun its next bullets, another connecting wires between lumps of a waxy substance that Pierod didn’t recognise.

He wished he had a weapon. No, that wasn’t right. He wished he had Rogirre, and that Rogirre had a weapon. He didn’t want to get his hands dirty, and besides, what if he missed? Much better to have a man do your dirty work for you.

The one with the waxy lumps finished his complicated wiring job, and nodded to the other two. His eyes were deep-set and beady, cast with a yellow tinge that Pierod could see from his hiding spot. They sat beneath a heavy brow and a bulbous, hairless skull.

Pierod ran a hand through his own shaggy, ash-blond hair now as the figure clutching the wired object thumbed a button on an attached control unit. The button flashed on, turning a bright red, and the figure raised his hand in a closed fist.

Ammunition replenished, the worker on the heavy cannon opened up again, aiming a withering salvo of fire at the command tower. Cover provided, the figure with the object – Pierod had assumed by now it was a demolition charge – tucked it to his chest, peeled out from behind the ­barricade, and began crouch-running across the open ground.

The first las-bolt hit him in the knee, and he crumpled, mid-shuffle, to the ground. His leg had been destroyed – that much was clear from the blackened and smoking hole in his jumpsuit, but the worker didn’t seem to care. Beady eyes lit with grim determination, he was clawing himself along the pockmarked ferrocrete when the second and third bolts hit, lancing into his back and the left side of his head. For a grim second Pierod thought the figure would keep moving forward, some kind of animated corpse from millennia-old legend, but its wiry arms slackened, and it lay motionless, come to rest on top of the bundle it had been carrying. A moment later, Pierod heard a wumph of detonation, and ducked back into his hatch as the constituent parts of the unfortunate worker pitter-pattered back to the ground as grisly rain.

The explosion disoriented the figures remaining behind the barricade, sending them stumbling backwards, and giving the snipers in the tower clear shots. Las-bolts converged on the two men, burning skin and muscle down to the bone. Secondary shots slammed into their lifeless forms even as they fell, sending their limp bodies skittering along the ferrocrete.

Silence descended on the scarred apron of the void port, and for a moment, Pierod considered staying put, hiding out in his hole until this whole grisly business was over, or until some ruffian put a bullet in his brainstem – whichever came first. But he was so close. With the cachet that came with his rank, he could demand access to a ship; he could get off-world, at least for a time, living out the remainder of this – whatever this was – in the confines of a luxury yacht. Once the shooting had stopped, he could return to Serrine as a leader-in-waiting, his noble bloodline and obviously superior genetics granting him a role at the very pinnacle of whatever government would be erected.

Pierod manoeuvred a sweaty leg over the edge of the hatch, placing his bottom on the ledge as he made to swing his other leg over. He caught his trailing foot halfway through the movement and tumbled out onto the open ferrocrete. He tucked into a ball, trying to make himself small, and whimpered as he waited for the sniper’s shot to finally end this most miserable of days.

No shot came. The only assault was from the pungent smell on the air: of smoke, ferrocrete dust and fyceline. There was something else, too, like the smell of Rogirre’s kitchen. It was the smell of the dead men, he realised, their flesh cooked by explosive flame and las-bolt.

He thought of sausages and fat meat rashers, the sizzle and spit of animal juices, and the char of a perfectly cooked roast. His stomach rumbled, and he baulked, pink face turning ashen.

He vomited then, noisily, body expunging Rogirre’s final gift to his master. The chunky liquid arced from his open mouth and hit the scarred ferrocrete with a playful splash, pieces of half-digested fowl and fruit seeds still recognisable amongst the mess.

Pierod hadn’t cried since his father had beaten him bloody at the age of fourteen for talking to the son of a butcher in the city, but as he sat in the besieged city, chased from his own home, covered in his own sick, he fought back tears.

His eyes felt hot, stinging, as though they too were being pierced by tiny las-bolts, just as those disgusting workers had been. They had come up here, from whatever undercity hovel they lived in, bringing their sweat and grime and stink into his city – his cultured, ordered, pristine city. How dare they?

No. No! This would not do! What would Father say? Father would stand, Father would lead, Father would survive. He was Pierod, scion of the Vaude family, and vice treasurer of Serrine. He would not be felled by some jumped-up ruffian in a dirty jumpsuit who didn’t know his place.

Pierod unfurled himself, bracing a quivering leg against the ferrocrete, before drawing himself unsteadily to his feet. Steadily, pointedly, he raised both his hands and his face to the building. ‘Throne help them if they shoot me,’ he muttered under his breath. And then louder, he shouted: ‘I am Vice Treasurer Pierod, and you will give me safe passage!’

A shot rang out from the top of the tower.