Necropolis (3 page)

Servos whined and the girl swung closer to Gnide, her limp feet trailing on the tiled floor.

“Are you my loyal marshal?” she asked, in that same flat monotone, that voice that wasn’t hers.

Gnide ignored her, looking past the meat puppet — as he called it — to the ornamental iron tank in the far corner of the room. The metal of the tank was dark and tarnished with startlingly green rust. A single round porthole looked out like a cataract-glazed eye.

“You know I am, High One.”

“Then why this disobedience?” the youth asked, atrophied limbs trembling as the strings and leads swung him round.

“This is not disobedience, High One. This is duty. And I will not speak to your puppets. I asked for audience with House Ruler Salvador Sondar himself.”

The cherub swung abruptly round into Gnide’s face. Sub-dermal tensors pulled its bloated mouth into a grin that was utterly unmatched by its dead eyes.

“They are me and I am them! You will address me through them!”

Gnide pushed the dangling cherub aside, flinching at the touch of its pallid flesh on his hand. He stalked up the low steps to the iron tank and stared into the lens port.

“Zoica mobilises against us, High One! A new Trade War is upon us! Orbital scans show this to be true!”

“It is not called Zoica,” the girl said from behind him. “Use its name.”

Gnide sighed. “Ferrozoica Hive Manufactory,” he said.

“At last, some respect,” rattled the cherub, bobbing around Gnide. “Our old foes, now our most worthy trading partners. They are our brethren, our fellow trade-hive. We do not raise arms against them.”

“With respect!” snapped Gnide. “Zoica has always been our foe, our rival. There were times last century they bettered us in output.”

“That was before House Sondar took the High Place here. Vervunhive is the greatest of all, now and ever after.” The youth-puppet began to drool slackly as it spoke.

“All Vervunhive rejoices that House Sondar has led us to domination. But the Legislature of the Noble houses has voted this hour that we should prepare for war. That is why the alarms were sounded.”

“Without me?” the girl hissed, flatly.

“As it is written, according to the customs, we signalled you. You did not reply. Mandate 347gf, as ratified by your illustrious predecessor, Heironymo, gives us authority to act.”

“You would use old laws to unseat me?” asked the cherub, clattering round on its strings to stare into Gnide’s face with dead eyes.

“This is not usurpation, High One. Vervunhive is in danger. Look!” Gnide reached forward and pressed a data-slate against the lens of the tank.

“See what the orbitals tell us! Months of silence from Zoica, signs of them preparing for war! Rumours, hearsay — why weren’t we told the truth? Why does this spring down on us so late in the day? Didn’t you know? You, all-seeing, all-knowing High One? Or did you just decide not to tell us?”

The puppets began to thrash and jiggle, knocking into Gnide. He pushed them off.

“I have been in constant dialogue with my counterpart in Ferrozoica Hive Manufactory. We have come to enjoy the link, the companionship. His Highness Clatch of House Clatch is a dear friend. He would not deceive me. The musterings along the Ferrozoica ramparts were made because of the crusade. Warmaster Slaydo leads his legions into our spatial territories; the foul enemy is resisting. It is a precaution.”

“Slaydo is dead, High One. Five years cold on Balhaut. Macaroth is the leader of the crusade now. The beloved Guard legions are sweeping the Sabbat Worlds clean of Chaos scum. We rejoice daily that our world, beloved Verghast, was not touched.”

“Slaydo is dead?” the three voices asked as one.

“Yes, High One. Now, with respect, I ask that we may test-start the Shield. If Zoica is massing to conquer us, we must be ready.”

“No! You undermine me! The Shield cannot be raised without my permission! Zoica does not threaten! Clatch is our friend! Slaydo is not dead!”

The three voices rose in a shrill chorus, the meat puppets quivering with unknowable rage.

“You would not have treated Heironymo with such disrespect!”

“Your brother, great one as he was, did not hide in an Awareness Tank and talk through dead servitors… High One.”

“I forbid it!”

Gnide pulled a glittering ducal seal from his coat. “The Legislature expected this. I am empowered by the houses of Vervunhive, in expediency, to revoke your powers as per the Act of Entitlement, 45jk. The Legislature commends your leadership, but humbly entreats you that it is now taking executive action.” Gnide pushed the puppets aside and crossed to a brass console in the far wall. He pressed the centre of the seal and data-limbs extended like callipers from the rosette with a machined click. Gnide set it in the lock and turned it.

The console flashed into life, chattering runes and sigils scrolling down the glass plate.

“No!” screeched the three voices. “This is insubordination! I am Vervunhive! I am Vervunhive!”

“You are dethroned for the good of the city,” Gnide snapped. He pressed the switches in series, activating the power generators deep beneath the hive. He entered the sequences that would engage the main transmission pylon and bring the Shield online.

The cherub flew at him. He batted it away and it upturned, tangling in its cords. Gnide punched in the last sequence and reached for the activation lever.

He gasped and fell back, reaching behind him. The girl puppet jerked away, a long blade wedged in her dead hands. The blade was dark with blood.

Gnide tried to close the gouting wound in his lower back. His knees gave and he fell. The girl swung in again and stuck the blade through his throat.

He fell, face down, soaking the carpet with his pumping blood.

“I am Vervunhive,” the girl said. The cherub and youth repeated it, dull and toneless.

Inside the iron tank, bathed in warm ichor and floating free, every organ and vessel connected by tubes to the life-bank, Salvador Sondar, High Master of Vervunhive… dreamed.

The salt grasses were ablaze. All along the scarp rise, Vervun Primary tanks were buckled and broken amid the rippling, grey grass, fire spilling out of them. The air was toxic with smoke.

Commissar Kowle dropped clear of the command tank as flames within consumed the shrieking Vegolain and his crew. Kowle’s coat was on fire. He shed it.

Enemy fire pummelled down out of the smoke-black air. A Vervun tank a hundred metres away exploded and sent Shockwaves of whickering shrapnel in all directions.

One shard grazed Kowle’s temple and dropped him.

He got up again. Crews were bailing from burning tanks, some on fire, some trying to help their blazing fellows. Others ran.

Kowle walked back through the line of decimated hive armour, smelling the salt grass as it burned, thick and rancid in his nose.

He pulled out his pistol.

“Where is your courage?” he asked a tank gunner as he put a round through his head.

“Where is your strength?” he inquired of two loaders fleeing up the slope, as he shot them both.

He put his muzzle to the head of a screaming, half-burned tank captain and blew out his brains. “Where is your conviction?” Kowle asked.

He swung round and pointed his pistol at a group of tank crewmen who were stumbling up the grassy rise towards him from their exploded tank.

“Well?” he asked. “What are you doing? This is war. Do you run from it?”

They hesitated. Kowle shot one through the head to show he meant business.

“Turn! Face the foe!”

The remaining crewmen turned and fled towards the enemy positions. A tank round took them all apart a second later.

Missiles strafed in from the low, cloudlike meteorites and sundered twenty more tanks along the Vervun formation. The explosions were impossibly loud. Kowle was thrown flat in the grass.

He heard the clanking as he rolled over. On the far rise, battletanks and gun platforms painted in the ochre livery of Zoica rolled down towards him.

A thousand or more.

Out of nowhere, just before nightfall, about a half-hour after the klaxons had stopped yelping, the first shells fell, unexpected, hurled by long-range guns beyond the horizon.

Two fell short on the southern outer habs, kicking up plumes of wreckage from the worker homes.

Another six dented the Curtain Wall.

At Hass West, Daur yelled to his men and cranked the guns around.
A target… give me a target…
he prayed.

Dug-in Zoica armour and artillery, hidden out in the burning grasslands, found their range. Shells began to drop into the hive itself.

A gigantic salvo hit the railhead at Veyveyr Gate and set it ablaze. Several more bracketed the Vervun Primary barracks and atomised over a thousand troopers waiting for deployment.

Another scatter pounded the northern habs along the river. Derricks and quays exploded and shattered into the water. In mid-stream, Folik’s over-laden ferry was showered with burning debris. Folik tried to turn in the current, yelling for Mincer. Another shell fell in the water nearby, drenching the screaming passengers with stinking river water. The ferry wallowed in the blast-wake.

Two more dropped beyond the
Magnificat,
exploding and sinking the ferry
Inscrutable,
which was crossing back over the tideway. The
Inscrutable

went up in a shockwave that peppered the water with debris. Diesel slicks burned on the choppy surface.

Folik pulled his wheel around and steered out into mid-channel. Mincer was screaming something at him, but the wail of shells drowned him out.

A staggered salvo rippled through the mining district, flattening wheel heads and pulley towers.

Deep below the earth, Gol Kolea tried to dig Trug Vereas out of the rock fall that had cascaded down the main lift chute of Number Seventeen Deep Working. All around, miners were screaming and dying.

Trug was dead, his head mashed.

Gol pulled back, his hands slick with his friend’s blood. Lift cables whipped back down the shaft as cages smashed and fell. The central access had collapsed in on them.

“Livy!” he screamed up into the abyss.
“Livy!”

Vor was obliterated by the first shell that came through the roof of Vervun Smeltery One. Agun Soric was thrown flat and a chip of ore flying from the blistering shock took out his left eye forever.

Blood from cuts to the scalp streamed down his face. He rolled over in the wreckage and then was lifted off the floor by another impact that exploded the main conveyor. A piece of oily bracket, whizzing supersonically across the work-floor, decapitated one of the screaming workers nearby and embedded itself in the meat of Soric’s thigh. He howled, but his cry was lost in the tumult and the klaxons as they started again.

Livy Kolea looked around as the glass roof of the transit station fell in explosively and she tried to shield Yoncy and Dalin.

Glass shrapnel ripped her to pieces, her and another sixty civilians. The aftershock of hot air crisped the rest. Dalin was behind a pillar and remained miraculously unscathed. He got up, crunching over the broken glass, calling for his mother.

When he found what was left of her, he fell silent, too stunned for noise.

Tona Criid took him up in her arms.

“S’okay, kid. S’okay.” She pulled over the upturned cart and saw the healthy, beaming face of the baby smiling back at her. Tona took up the infant under one arm and dragged the boy behind her.

They were twenty metres from the south atrium when further shells levelled carriage station C4/a.

* * *

Menx and Troor escorted Guilder Worlin through the chaos of the Commercia. Several barter-houses to their west were ablaze and smoke clogged the marketways. The closest carriage station with links to the Main Spine was C4/a, but there was a vast smoke plume in that direction. Menx redirected their route through the abandoned Guild Fayk barter-house and headed instead for C7/d.

By the time they reached the funicular railway depot, Guilder Worlin was crying with rage. The bodyguard thought it was for fear of his life, but Worlin was despairing for purely mercantile reasons. Guild Worlin had no holdings in weaponshops, medical supplies, or food sources. War was on them and they had no suitable holdings to exploit.

They entered the carriage station, but the place was deserted. A few abandoned possessions — purse-bags, pict-slates and the like — were scattered on the platform. The transit indicator plate overhead was blank.

“I want,” Worlin hissed through clenched teeth, “to return to the Main Spine now. I want to be in the family house, to be inside the Spine hull. Now!”

Troor looked down the monotrack and turned back. “I see lights, sir. A transit approaches.”

The carriage train pulled into the station and stopped on automatic for a moment. The twin cars were packed full of Low — and Mid-Spine citizens.

“Let me in!” Worlin banged on the nearest door-hatch. Terrified faces looked out at him silently.

Shells walloped into the Commercia behind him. Worlin pulled out his needle pistol and opened fire through the glass. The passengers, trapped like rats in a cage, screamed as they were slaughtered.

After a brief hesitation, Worlin’s bodyguard joined him, slaughtering twenty or more with their unshrouded guns. Others fled the carriage, screaming. Pulling out bodies, the guards hauled Worlin into the carriage, just as the automatic rest period finished and the transit resumed. It engaged on the cog-track and slowly began to crank up into the hull of the main Spine.

“House Sondar, deliver us from evil,” hissed Worlin, sitting down on a gilt bench seat and rearranging his robes. Menx and Troor stood nearby, uneasy and unnerved.

Worlin gazed out of the window of the rising transit, apparently not seeing the smoke blooms and fireballs rising across the city below — just as he didn’t seem to see the pools of blood that washed around his shoes.

Volleys of shells and long-range missiles pounded into the southern face of the Main Spine. Despite the thick adamantine and ceramite sheath, some even punctured the skin of the great structure. A glassmaker’s showrooms on the Mid-Spine Promenade took a direct hit and blew out, filling the air with whizzing splinters of lead-crystal and ceramite wall debris. Fifty house ordinary nobles and their retainers were shredded or burnt as they hurried in panic down the plush walkways.