Dan Abnett - Necropolis

He ran up the slope after them, but they were gone.

In a foxhole a hundred metres away from the back of the storage barns, Tona Criid hugged Dalin to her and willed him to be quiet.

Good boy, good boy, she murmured. She took out the biscuits and tore the wrap open so he could have one.

Dalin wolfed it down. He was hungry. They were all hungry out here.

Nutrient clouds pumped into the Iron Tank fed the dreaming High Master of Vervunhive. He rolled in his oily fluid womb, pulling at his link feeds, feet and hands twitching like a dreaming dog. He dreamed of the Trade War, before his birth. The images of his dream were informed by the pict-library he had studied in his youth. He dreamed of his illustrious predecessor, the great Heironymo, haughtily spurning the rivalry with Ferrozoica, arming for war. How wrong, how very foolish! Such a grossly physical stubbornness! And the hive held him in such esteem for his heroic leadership! Fools! Cattle! Unthinking chaff!

Commerce is always war. But the war of commerce may be fought in such subtle, exquisite ways. To raise arms, to mobilise bodies, to turn beautiful hive profits into war machines and guns, rations and ammunition

What a pathetic mind, Heironymo! How blind of you to miss the real avenues of victory! House Clatch would have bowed to mercantile embargoes long before the brave boys of Vervun Primary had overturned the walls of Zoica! A concession here, a bargain there, a stifling of funds or supplies, a blockade

Salvador Sondar floated upwards, his dreams now machine-language landscapes of autoledgers, contoured ziggurats of mounted interest values, rivers of exchange rates, terraces of production value outputs.

The mathematical vistas of mercantile triumph he adored more than any other place in the universe.

He twitched again in the warm soup, iridescent bubbles coating his shrunken limbs and fluttering to the roof of the Iron Tank. He was pleased now that he had killed the old man. Heironymo had ruled too long! A hundred and twenty years old, beloved by the stupid, vapid public, still unwilling to make way for his twenty year-old nephew and obvious successor! It had been a merciful act, Salvador dreamed to himself, though the guilt of it had plagued him for the last fifty years. His sleeping features winced.

Yes, it had been merciful for the good of the hive and for the further prosperity of House Sondar, noble line! Had output not tripled during his reign? And now Gnide and Croe and Chass and the other weaklings told him that mercantile war was no longer an option! Fools!

Gnide

Now he was dead, wasn't he?

And Slaydo too? The great warmaster, dead of poison. No, that wasn't right. Stabbed on the carpet of the audience hall no no

Why were his dreams so confused? It was the chatter. That was it. The chatter. He wished it would cease. It was a hindrance to reason. He was High Master of Vervunhive and he wanted his dream-mind dean and unpolluted so he could command his vast community to victory once more.

The Shield? What? What about the Shield?

The chatter was lisping something.

No! N-n

Salvador Sondar's dreams were suddenly as suspended as the dreamer for a moment. Fugue state snarled his dream-mind. He floated in the tank as if dead.

Then the dreams resumed in a rush. To poison the servitor taster, that had been a stroke of genius! No one had ever suspected! And to use a neural toxin that left no trace. A stroke, they had said! A stroke had finally levelled old Heironymo! Salvador had been forced to inject his own tear glands with saline to make himself cry at the state funeral.

The weeping! The mass mourning! Fifty years ago, but still it gnawed at him! Why had the hivers loved the old bastard so dearly?

The chatter was there again, at the very boundary of his mind-impulse limit, like crows in a distant treeline at dawn, like insects in the grasslands at dusk.

Chattering

The Shield? What are you saying about the Shield?

I am Salvador Sondar. Get out of my mind and

The wasted body twitched and spasmed in the Iron Tank.

Outside, the servitors jiggled and jerked in sympathy.

The vast railhead terminal at Veyveyr Gate was a dank, blackened mess. Clouds of steam rolled like fog off the cooling rubble and tangled metal where millions of litres of fluid retardant had been sprayed on the incendiary fires to get them under control.

Major Jun Racine of the Vervun Primary moved between the struggling work teams and tried to supervise the clearance work. Tried it was a joke. He had two hundred bodies, mostly enlisted men, but some Administratum labourers, as well as trackwrights and rolling-stock stewards from the Rail Guild. It was barely enough even to make a dent in destruction of this scale.

Racine was no structural engineer. Even with fourteen heavy tractors fitted with dozer blades at his disposal, there was no way he was going to meet House Command's orders and get the railhead secure in three days. Great roof sections had slumped like collapsed egg-shell, and rockcrete pillars had crumpled and folded like soft candy-sticks. He was reluctant to instruct his men to dig out anything for fear of bringing more down. Already he had sent five men to the medical halls after a section of wall had toppled on them.

The air was wet and acrid, and water dripped down from every surface, pooling five centimetres deep on any open flooring.

Racine checked his data-slate again. The cold, basic schematics on its screen simply didn't match anything here in real life. He couldn't even locate the positions of the main power and gas-feed mains. Nearby, a rail tractor unit sat up-ended in a vast crater, its piston wheels dangling off its great black iron shape. What if fuel had leaked from it? Racine thought about leaked fuel, shorting electrics, spilling gas even unexploded bombs an awful lot. He did the maths and hated the answer he kept getting.

Tough job, major, said a voice from behind him.

Racine turned. The speaker was a short, bulky man in his fifties, black with grime and leaning on an axe-rack as a crutch. He had a serious eye-wound bandaged with a filthy strip of linen. But his clothes, as far as Racine could make out under the char and the dirt, were those of a smeltery gang boss.

You shouldn't be here, friend, Racine said with a patient smile.

None of us should, Agun Soric replied, stomping forward. He stood beside Racine and they both gazed dismally out over the tangled ruins of the railhead towards the vast, looming shape of the gate and the Curtain Wall. It was a sea of rubble and debris, and Racine's workforce moved like ants around the merest breakwaters of it.

I didn't ask for this. I'm sure you didn't either, Soric said.

Gak, but that's right! You from the refuges?

Name's Soric, plant supervisor, Vervun Smeltery One. Soric made a brief gesture over at the vast, ruined shell of the once-proud ore plant adjacent to the railhead. I was in there when the shells took it. Quite a show.

I'll bet. Get many out?

Soric sucked air through his teeth and looked down, shaking his bullet-head. Not nearly enough. Three hundred, maybe. Got ourselves places in a refuge eventually. It was all a bit confused.

Racine looked round at him, taking in the set power and simmering anger inside the hive worker. What's it like? I hear the refuges are choked to capacity.

It's bad. Imagine this, Soric pointed to the railhead destruction, but the ruins are human, not rockcrete and ceramite. Supplies are short: food, clean water, medical aid. They're doing their best, but you know millions of homeless, most of them hurt, all of them scared.

Racine shivered.

I tried to get some aid for my workers, but they told me that all refugees were set on fourth-scale rations unless they were employed in the hive war effort. That might get them bumped up to third-scale, maybe even second.