CHAPTER FIVE

The sky was more beautiful than she had imagined. Cecily had grown up in the undercity, where the uniform pink haze blocked out the stars entirely and reduced sunlight to a weak glow. Now the sun blazed in a cobalt-blue sky, impossibly bright and primally gorgeous. She tried to stare at it, and was surprised when her eyes hurt.

She stared at the ground instead. Even that was beautiful, made up of thousands of fragments of glass, streaked with flecks of gold, forming streets and thoroughfares that dazzled as they caught the bright sunlight. Those streets were lined with statues and sculptures of muscular men and women, of soldiers and saints, of cavorting children and strange hybrid animals, rendered in marble, bronze and gold.

What a wonderful world she lived on, and she had never known.

Did she belong here, above the clouds?

She had been shepherded into one of the great elevators that carried machinery between the under- and overcities of the planet, she remembered. It had been bitterly cold inside the elevator shaft. The utilitarian structure was designed for the transit of huge threshing machines, not fragile human bodies, and there was no roof or walls to the platform, no heating to keep out the elements. There had been fifty of them, give or take, in her group. She looked around as they made the journey upwards. The luminary on the stage had gone; instead, she saw only focused men and women, their deep-set eyes locked on crude weapons, on battered data-slates, or fixed into the middle distance. She was surprised she hadn’t seen any of them before.

The door slid open, and her compatriots debarked from the elevator en masse. Most of the group moved with purpose, but others, like her, hung back, disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings and confused as to their aim.

They caught the attention of the largest men, who moved among these stragglers, pointing at objectives, distributing weapons, and cajoling the reluctant. One of them had spied her and pressed a small and battered autopistol into her hand. She had taken it without question. She looked down at it now, seeing it properly for the first time. She was surprised to find it was so heavy. She’d never held a weapon before and had no idea how to load it, but she knew enough that she should keep her fingers away from the trigger, and instead wrapped them tightly around the ragged material that covered its grip. She hoped she would never have to use it.

What was she doing here, anyway? She had been in bed in her hab-block when she walked out into the grass and saw… something.

Move forward. Stay with the group.

She was further from the surface of her world than she’d ever been before, but she still heard the grass. It tickled at her mind, leading her onwards, away from the industrial detritus of the elevator loading platform and into the city itself, past huge statues and glittering spires. She saw unfamiliar people as she moved, wearing clothes of gaudy colours: oranges, purples, greens and blues. They were well fed, even rotund, and clean. Their faces were free of the dirt and dust of the undercity, and they were contorted. Not in fear at the invading mass from below, but in disgust – sneering faces that disappeared behind locked doors and down side streets, putting physical distance between themselves and the interlopers from below.

There was confusion, too. Men and women stopped and stared, open-mouthed at a sight as alien to them as the overcity was to her. Those that stood too close were shoved aside; others who stood in the way and tried to question the group’s intentions were beaten to the ground with rifle butts, their brightly coloured clothes disappearing under work boots as the mass kept moving.

The hive is strong. The individual is weak.

The grass spoke differently now. It had spoken only at night before, and with a voice feather-light, as sinuous and flowing as the pink blades themselves. Now with the sun she had never before seen high in the sky, it spoke with a hard edge. It commanded her.

They had reached an open area, some kind of central square decorated with statues, fountains and even trees. She had only ever seen the grass before, rendered in pale pink, and found it staggering that plants could be so vibrantly green. Hundreds of overcity dwellers milled around, standing in small groups or sitting at outdoor cafes, eating, drinking and talking. They wore jewellery: rings, bracelets, and necklaces of gold and silver, the kind of luxury that only the wealthiest gang bosses and smugglers could afford in the undercity. She met the gaze of one moon-faced woman in an elaborate yellow robe, who scanned her up and down, narrow eyes widening as they came to rest on the pistol she held in her hand.

Across the square, she saw another group of undercity workers, their drab clothing incongruous in such a riot of colour.

Take your weapon. Kill the prey.

There was a monstrous cracking sound, and the moon-faced woman flew backwards, arms windmilling before she landed in a heap on the floor. Her eyes were still open, still wide, as her yellow robe stained red with her lifeblood, leaking from ragged holes in her body.

Cecily spun to find the source of the sound – louder than anything she had ever heard before – and saw a worker in pink-stained overalls a few paces in front of her, a rifle cradled in his arms. He grimaced as he levelled the weapon again, finding a new target in the mass of people in the square.

Some, the sharpest amongst them, ran. Several of them were shot in the back as they fled, falling forward into splayed shapes of bright colours like exotic birds. Others stood still as they died, dumbstruck by the incongruity of the situation. Those that had the capacity to escape did so, and humanity flowed out of the square like blood out of a wound. Still, her new-found comrades kept firing, a barrage of light and sound disrupting the previous tranquillity of the square.

Kill, kill, kill.

She raised her pistol, lifting it towards the back of a man who had stumbled as he tried to run. He scrambled now, half crawling, tripping over his robe in pure panic. The gun shook in her hand as she tried to steady her aim, to kill for the voice in her head, to do as she was told. Her finger moved to the trigger as the man turned, mouth pulled into a rictus of terror.

Kill for the hive.

She squeezed her finger to the cold metal, and the gun bucked in her hand. The bullets flew high and wide, and the man stood up, shaping to run.

‘No…’ she gasped. She tried to drop the gun, its barrel smoking, to the ground, but her fingers would not release their grip.

‘Keep shooting,’ the man next to her hissed, as he loosed off a burst of fire at the fleeing figure. The first bullet took the stumbling man in the neck, and he crumpled to the floor, lost in the folds of his clothing.

Kill for the hive, the voice in her head commanded again. It was louder now, a buzzing, grinding voice that overloaded her senses and seemed to control her body. Involuntarily, she raised her pistol again, her shaking hand moving without her guidance. She saw a sea of fleeing humans, and found them in the autopistol’s sights. Her finger curled around the trigger, and she squeezed. The shots went wide, to her relief, and the strident sound of their exit from the gun shook her out of her daze.

‘No, no, no, no!’

With her off hand, she pushed the muzzle of the autopistol to the ground, squeezing the trigger over and over, until the weapon stopped its booming report, and offered only a clicking sound. With a mental effort that left sweat beading on her brow, she forced the voice down in her consciousness, drawing back to reality. This was not the grass, she realised as she met the dead-eyed stares of those workers around her. This was something else, and it was speaking to her brothers and sisters from the city below, guiding them to maim and kill for its pleasure.

‘Stop,’ she whispered, suddenly aghast with her senses returned. ‘This isn’t right!’

The man closest to her turned, sharp teeth flashing in a sneering mouth. ‘Look how they live,’ he snarled. ‘See what they hoarded while we rotted and died below! Kill them, or we will kill you!’ He cuffed her across the back of the skull, and she pitched forward under the weight of the blow, ears ringing and vision tunnelling as she fell onto her hands at the feet of the group.

It was no idle threat, she realised. Another man in the group, easily into his sixth decade by the sag and wrinkle of his stained skin, was also wavering. His cassock, sewn together from grass storage sacks and marked with the unmistakable pink of Solipsus sap, denoted him as a preacher.

‘Stop this madness!’ he shouted as he dropped his own pistol to the floor, a plea for mercy amid the bloodshed.

Without a word, one of the workers turned and shot him through the chest. The old man raised a quivering hand to the hole in his body, looking down quizzically at the ruin of blood and meat and bone, before slumping slowly to the floor.

She gasped, covering her mouth with a dirty hand. She wanted to scream, but the brute stood over her still, his rifle raised for a backhand swing. This one was aimed at her head, and his corded muscles – freakish in their size – meant that the blow would crack her skull like a bird egg.

She raised an arm to defend herself, and centred her thoughts around a single message.

She tuned herself not to the grinding, buzzing voice that was palpating at her consciousness, but to the wind, to the trees, to the essence of Serrine. After years of listening to the secrets of the grass, she could speak the planet’s language, so she spoke.

Let me go, she said.

The man’s angry eyes clouded for a second, his grimacing mouth slackening. His rifle drooped in his grasp, and he looked up for a moment, towards the sky, trying to find the source of the image in his mind. He stared back down, confusion writ large on his face – a receiver cut off from the signal.

She took her chance. She pulled herself into a crouch, pushing through legs and past bodies until she reached the edge of the group, before barrel­ling into a sprint. She ran for debris, for chunks of twisted metal and uprooted trees, ducking behind splintered wooden benches, waiting for the bullet that would sever her connection to this world for good.

The las-bolt fizzed through the air so close that Pierod could smell the burned ozone, flying over his left shoulder. He turned to look, and saw a body slumped half-out of the hatch exit, smoke wisping from a hole in the side of its neck. The body hung there for a moment, almost comedically relaxed, before it was thrown forward by some unseen force, its legs flipping forward over its hairless head until it came to rest in a heap. Behind it a gun appeared, pointed fingers squeezing against the trigger.

Pierod didn’t wait to see what came next. He ran again, sprinting forward as fast as his underutilised legs could carry him, towards the command tower. Las-bolts tracked over his head from the snipers in the building, and he turned back to watch the first few converge with their targets, catching glimpses over his shoulder of workers that seemed to be rising up from drainage tunnels and maintenance shafts – an endless stream of ugly humanity, each bearing crude weapons and clad in tattered robes.

He saw where these figures had fallen before: dozens of bodies littered the apron of the void port. The majority of the corpses he passed were workers, their provenance clear by their filthy clothes and peculiar skin tone. He had heard that those in the undercity were tainted by their proximity to Solipsus sap, but these figures had a waxy, purple sheen that was alien to any human Pierod had ever met.

He saw mutants, too. Huge, dead things, twice the height of some of the more stunted workers, their brows so heavy as to be ridged with bone. Chitinous armour seemed to be grafted to their purple skin, and in some unsettling cases, their silhouettes were perverted by the growth of an extra arm, an unnatural addition that jutted out from their armpits. Even in death they clutched huge blades and hammers – crude weapons that were stained with worrying amounts of blood.

One of these giants seemed to coalesce from the smoky air itself as Pierod drew within the shadow of the command tower. It was lumbering into a run towards Pierod until it took a las-bolt in the side of the head. The shot seared half its skull away, but still it kept coming, the dull light in its eyes no less dimmed for having a sizeable chunk of its brain cooked off. A second shot took its legs out from underneath it, while a third removed the rest of the skull, the massive body left twitching and jerking where it fell.

The scale of death and destruction was staggering, but Pierod noticed the corpses changing around him as he ran. These were not the bodies of workers, mutants, or whatever in the Emperor’s name these things were. These figures were clad in the lurid magenta robes of Serrine’s planetary defence forces.

The dead men and women were big, and even in death they were beautiful. Serrine’s elite militia made use of the planet’s surplus of rejuvenat drugs, putting their soldiers through intense treatment regimens to prolong their lifespan and enhance their growth. This, coupled with a lack of any major threat to the overcity, meant that even shackled to a soldier’s spartan existence, service was a qualified honour on Serrine: a prize for the semi-nobles and the upper middle classes, who would send their second sons and daughters to the forces.

Only occasionally were these soldiers pressed into service, asked to delve below the haze line that separated Serrine’s society – to weed out some smuggler, or to eliminate a gang leader who had managed to whip up the disparate worker clans into something approaching revolutionary fervour. Most of the rest of their time was spent at guard posts in front of the city’s huge number of monuments, statues and artworks, or performing in elaborate parades.

They had clearly not been ready for this. The dead men and women wore their mortal injuries like fashionable makeup, the trickles of blood that ran from open mouths and the pale skin of bloodless faces seeming to copy trends that Pierod had seen in boutiques and salons across the great overcity. Only their unnerving stillness hinted at the truth.

Scores of these bodies were draped over the imposing steps that led up to the command tower door. Pierod picked his way past the corpses as small-arms fire cracked and pinged against the building’s reinforced frontage.

He slammed his bulk against the door, hammering his fists as he tried to finally catch his breath. ‘Let me… in,’ he wheezed, his heart thumping so hard in his throat that he thought he would be sick again. Then he shrieked, ‘Let me in, you morons!’ as an autogun shell slammed into the plasteel of the door a few feet above his head, gouging out a small circular hole.

He heard a crunching sound on the other side, and a small slit opened in the door. A pair of cold eyes looked out, scanning the killing field ahead before coming to rest on the vomit-covered figure of Pierod, cowering below. The eyes widened in surprise.

‘Pierod?’ the owner of the eyes said. ‘Dear Throne, man, I thought you of all people would certainly be dead.’

He had been shot at more times than he could count already today, but Pierod still found time to bristle at the remark.

‘Frojean, let me in!’

‘Yes yes, of course. Let me just find someone to help…’

Pierod heard the voice tail off as the slit slammed shut. Somewhere not so far away, he heard a boom, and turned to see a boxy tank trundling towards the command tower. The war machine was a relic – one of a handful still functional on the planet, taken out of the museum it inhabited only for parades and festivals. Pierod didn’t think it had ever fired a shot in anger.

It was firing now, though. The tank’s cannon belched white smoke, and a fireball blossomed against the armour of the last craft on the void port’s apron. There was a secondary boom as something inside the lightly armoured ship – designed for high-atmosphere jaunts, rather than the rigours of combat – exploded. Pierod threw his arm across his face as pieces of crystalflex came raining back to solid ground with a melodious tinkling sound.

‘Frojean, let me in!’ Pierod screamed. There was another scraping sound, louder this time, and the huge doors opened a crack. Pierod pushed himself through the gap, sucking in his stomach as he went, and spilled out onto the synthetic floor of the void port’s central control centre.

‘Oh Pierod, my good man,’ Frojean said, towering over him. Frojean always towered: the man was rail thin and almost as tall as Serrine’s grasses. He would’ve been even taller were he not locked in a permanent stoop. It gave him an air of perpetual disapproval that he only exacerbated by perpetually disapproving of everything and everyone he came across.

‘What’s going on?’ Frojean asked. ‘Are we being invaded?’

‘They are our own,’ Pierod said. ‘Rebels from the city below.’

‘Oh, how frightful!’ Frojean gasped, involuntarily throwing a long-fingered hand to his mouth. ‘What malady has affected them so that they would turn against their own kin?’

‘Never mind that!’ Pierod snapped, hauling himself to his feet. They were unsteady – he was crashing from his adrenaline spike, and he had run faster and harder than the last time old Master Tuille made him run the length of the parade ground for stealing an extra sweetcake. ‘Get me to the vox! We must call for aid.’

Frojean looked confused. ‘Aid?’ he said, hands once again folded together. ‘I share your worry, but Pierod, my good man, who would provide us aid? We haven’t had a harvest collection in thirty years, and even our finest astropaths have been unable to communicate with Terra. Come, the nastiness outside must have been dreadful – join me and our esteemed colleagues in the shelter below, and we can wait for our forces to put down these dogs.’

Frojean loomed over him with an expression of such perfect smugness that Pierod had to fight not to hit him in his beak-like nose.

‘I am not your good man,’ Pierod snapped. ‘I am your superior, and you shall address me as such. Even if these rebels do not breach our defences, we do not have the supplies for a siege, and with lines cut to the factoria and refineries below, we have no way of obtaining more. There will be no waiting this out, and there will be no counter-push from our militia – scores of them lie dead outside this very door!’

The robe-clad soldiers in the room shared worried glances. At least, Pierod assumed they were worried; their wrinkle-free skin was pulled so taut against their perfect jaws and cheekbones that there was barely any expression at all on their faces.

‘I will get off this world, even if I have to launch you into the atmosphere, Frojean. Now take me to the central vox-unit.’

Frojean recovered his composure with a speed that drew some grudging respect from Pierod. ‘Of course, vice treasurer. Follow me – these good fellows will lead the way.’ He pointed at a small group of uniformly beautiful soldiers, their magenta robes splayed open at the waist to display tightly wound leather strapping around their legs and midsections. The robes marked them out as members of the Sophisticant Sixth: Serrine’s elite military unit.

The men and women looked stunned to be addressed in such a manner, but, again, Pierod couldn’t tell if they were genuinely surprised to be called upon by a member of the middle nobility, or if that was just their default expression. To their credit, they began to move into formation: two at the front, leading their party up the large staircase in the middle of the huge foyer, and two at the rear, covering the double doors warily with ornate lasguns.

The bullets sang as Cecily ran, high-pitched notes that descended in tone as they flew past her shoulders and over her head. Her fellow citizens had noticed the deserter in their midst, and were now trying to bring her down.

She cleared the edge of the park and reached a side avenue off the main square. Even this minor thoroughfare was lined with statues of all sizes, their white stone gleaming in the midday sun. She saw men and women, children and cherubs, figures holding swords, quills, containers and coins.

Her legs kept pumping, carrying her past buildings of glass and tempered metal. She could hear the crackle of gunfire not only from the square, but from elsewhere in the overcity too, and knew that her group was just one of many that had come up on the huge elevators – an invasion force from within.

Her own pistol hung heavy in her hand, and she thought about tossing it away, when three figures appeared at the end of the street. She skidded to a halt, throwing herself against the plinth holding the closest statue aloft, praying for the invaders to pass.

She tilted her head back as she mouthed pleas to the Emperor and saw the statue she had chosen, silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky. Its muscular body bore four arms, and in each hand, it carried the objects she and her people toiled for: the threshing blade, the grass, the sap, and the water that gave life to the world.

This city was alien to her, but she knew this figure. Grandfather had told her the stories of an angel from the sky who had descended on wings of fire, who had cleansed the land and planted the grass, who would return again when Serrine had its most dire need. ‘The Saviour’, he had called this angel.

She risked a peek over the plinth. The men at the end of the road had moved on.

‘Incoming vox request from the surface.’ The mound of flesh spoke again.

‘Put it through,’ Xantine ordered. ‘They can answer for their desecration of my glorious ship.’

Immediately, a male voice filled the bridge, breathing hard with exertion. He had clearly been attempting to contact the Exhortation for some time.

‘…for the Emperor’s sake, vessel of the Imperium! We are loyal citizens of the Imperium! Help us!’

‘Help you?! How dare you…’ Rhaedron began, before Xantine held up a silk-gloved hand, cutting her off.

The mortal on the vox spoke again, panic and anger dragging his voice into new registers. ‘I am Pierod Vaude, vice treasurer of Serrine, vital agri world of the Imperium, and we humbly request your aid! We are under attack from our own citizens, rebels who have turned against their Emperor. Our city is falling, and our government is in hiding. We will not survive much longer. Please, help us!’

Rhaedron looked to Xantine, but the Space Marine’s hand remained raised, offering only silence. The human voice grew more strained, trying a different approach now.

‘My father had friends on Terra, you know. I demand you send forces to assist us on the double, or they will hear of your scurrilous cowardice.’ Another beat. Pierod screamed, equal parts frustration and fear. ‘You cowards! Help us!’

Xantine finally spoke. ‘Human, do you know to whom you speak?’ he said, his voice soft, but his tone iron-hard.

Pierod gulped, audibly, his bluster evaporating. ‘I apologise, my lord, I do not. I know only that we speak to a vessel of the Imperium! Our auspex scanners are having trouble picking up your ship’s signifiers.’

‘You require help? Make your report, then, so that my forces understand how best we may assist,’ Xantine said, relishing the chance to play a part in this production.

‘We are under attack from within. Traitors and rogues have destroyed half the city, captured the central palace, and worst of all, they killed Rogirre!’

‘And where are the soldiers to defend your city? Are they so cowardly that you must call upon the Adeptus Astartes to assist?’

‘Astartes? Did you say Astartes?’ Pierod asked, incredulous. ‘Are you Space Marines?’

‘Yes, mortal. You speak to the pinnacle of the species.’

‘Then… then the Emperor Himself must have sent you! Oh, of course, of course. Father said that Terra had turned its back on us, but Terra would never forsake a world as important as Serrine. Oh Throne, thank you!’ Pierod laughed, giddy with relief.

‘Your soldiers?’

‘Oh, yes! Our Sophisticant elite guard still stand – they are here, defending the planet’s most valuable individuals, myself included. The remnants of our militia must also stand, but they are under heavy attack, and I have no idea of how many remain.’

‘Very good, Pierod, very good,’ Xantine said, licking his lips. ‘And what else can you offer us?’

‘Offer you?’ Pierod’s astonishment was clear even over the distortion of Ghelia’s vox-output. ‘My lord, please, we are a simple agri world – what could we offer to the true children of the Emperor?’

Xantine let a smile play out across his blackened lips. ‘Oh, believe me, Pierod, we are true Children of the Emperor. But you have seen the Great Rift that blankets the sky. Do you think yours is the only world that suffers, that calls out into the void for aid? The Emperor helps those who help themselves, and we must reach an accord before we are able to provide our services.’ He waited a beat. ‘So, I ask again – what can you offer us?’

‘Anything! Anything you desire,’ Pierod responded. ‘We have ammunition, we have fuel, we have medicine. Take it, and afterwards, when the day is won, I personally will lead the procession in your honour. Just help us!’

‘Then the stage is set. Pierod, tell your world to prepare for our arrival. The Emperor’s Children are coming to save you.’