Valdor: Birth of the Imperium Read online

  That had been two nights ago. Now he was on the trail of different quarry, one of considerably less elevated pedigree but no less importance, at least to the matter at hand.

  Night was falling, though the murmur and clank of construction never ceased. As the light died in the west, the lumens flickered on, spilling weak orange light across the gritty ­thoroughfares. Ophar descended through the outer tangle of the Masonic quarters, where the hab-blocks were rammed up tight and the shadows in the narrow streets lay heavy.

  It was a bustling, claustrophobic space, every inch of it crushed with the steady movement of people. Neon signs had been slung overhead, some proclaiming gaudy Imperial propa­ganda – A New Age Dawns. The Emperor Delivers It! Report All Suspicious Activity To Your Local Arbites Tower – others with commercials from the big trading guilds. Out of the mountain wind, the smells became more varied – medical supplies with their chemical tang, caged animals smuggled in under the noses of the customs watchers, the earthy stinks of close-packed humanity. Music blared from cheap voxcasters, tinny electrosynth ballads, stirring military anthems sung by regimental choirs, all blending into a cacophony that swilled and swirled through the narrow passages and made the hubbub of different dialects all the more unintelligible.

  He was not the only robed official making his way through the jostling masses, and few gave him a second glance. Everything had an air of impermanence, of semi-completion, as if foundations were still being settled into place and no one quite knew just what would be piled on top of them yet.

  He stepped aside to allow the passage of a big, lurching personnel carrier, then slipped down a narrow side street. In the distance, he could just make out the towering watch-piers of the checkpoint gate, several storeys higher than the surrounding buildings. That was where most of the incoming traffic from the southern approach highways came in, and he knew there were queues of transports stretching far out into the landscape beyond, waiting for their turn for scrutiny. Several flyers hung like hawks in the evening gloaming, their autoguns trained to respond to the first sign of disturbance. This was a weak point, a point of danger, a point of opportunity. All gates were.

  Away from the main thoroughfare, things got darker and quieter. He passed open doorways with occupants backlit by grimy lumens – families crammed into one-room apartments, children squalling, arguments floating out into the night air. He found the stairwell and dropped down a tight spiral of metal steps. The smell of some oily cooking wafted up from grilles in the brick walls on either side, and soon he was before a blastplate-door with a slit opening. He bent down and rapped on it – three knocks, then two more.

  A panel flashed up with a red sigil-stream, a meaningless collection of runes unless you knew what to look for. Ophar inserted the lockword into the slot, and waited for the clunk. He pressed his face up against a glassy panel by the door hinges, and felt the hot prickle of a dermal scan. Then the locks snapped, and the door swung inwards.

  After that, there were more stairs, going down again, getting hotter and darker. He was frisked by a burly guard who looked half-mutant, his pale pink skin swelling behind ill-fitting armour plates. Then he was ushered into the room beyond, and the door slammed closed behind.

  ‘Hello, Hellac,’ said a man sitting behind a metal desk. ‘If that’s really your name.’

  Ophar grabbed a chair, hiking his robes as he sat down. ‘Hello, Voranchek,’ he said. ‘If that’s really yours.’

  The man was skinny, dressed in synthleather fatigues and with purple glass spectacles perched on a long nose. His fingers drummed and twitched on the desktop. Behind him stood cabinets with neatly labelled drawers. An olive thick-pile carpet made the floor feel sticky, and an air-cycler rattled away in the background.

  ‘Got it?’ Voranchek asked.

  Ophar pulled up his sleeve and flicked open the lead-lined panel inserted into his inner forearm. The original bone had been mangled in the escape from Banda all those years ago, and its replacement had proved far more useful. A credit-bead popped out, and he tossed it over to Voranchek.

  The man took it, pulled a verifier from one of the desk’s compartments, and ran the checks. The machine’s screen blinked out an allocation total.

  Voranchek smiled. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’ll do. Tell me, though. I know they pay you people well, but not this well. So which departmento are you assigned to, again?’

  ‘Departmento Mysterioso. Look it up – it’s well resourced.’

  Voranchek laughed. ‘Fair enough.’ He reached for another compartment, and produced a data-slate. It was of an old design, one of the marques produced back when a bomb could fall at any time and ruggedness was prized over portability. The protective sleeve looked as though it had rusted, and its connector plugs were mottled with patina. ‘This has everything for the past two months, plus some annexes that we had from an earlier sweep. Consider it a free gift, mostly because you didn’t haggle. I don’t like haggling. We should be past all that now, don’t you think?’

  Ophar took the slate, extended a reader-probe, and slid it into the plug. He felt a mild tingle as the input flood bundled into his augmetic reader. The data was there, just as it should be, complete with verifier seals and authentication warrants. These were hard to forge, even for those with the resources to try.

  ‘More than I thought,’ murmured Ophar, watching the figures slide across his visual field.

  ‘More than I thought, too,’ said Voranchek. ‘If you hadn’t ever come down here, and started to raise those most interesting questions, we’d never have mined it all. Which makes me wonder who you are again. See, I just can’t help myself.’

  ‘These primary seals – what’s their origin?’ Ophar asked, ignoring him.

  ‘I don’t know. Not ones I’ve seen before, but they supersede the customs clearance vectors, so someone powerful. You want my guess? These were issued in the Senatorum, right at the top. Or near the top. Look carefully – none of this stock’s been skimmed. Even my stuff gets skimmed, and we have the security to make people scared of us. But these detachments – they’re all intact. Squeaky clean. Never seen that before.’

  ‘And none were intercepted?’

  ‘They went right on through. Like I said, if you hadn’t showed up–’

  ‘But I didn’t, Voranchek. I was never here. We never had this conversation.’

  Voranchek laughed. ‘Oh, really? Well, that’s more difficult. I have a lot of people who might be interested in this. You pay well, but–’

  ‘We pay very well.’ Ophar cut off the feed, and slotted the security clasp over the slate’s plugs. ‘You might like to reflect on that. You might like to reflect on how serious we must be, to be able to pay you so well, so quickly, without any prior clearance. You might like to further reflect that your operations over the proscribed zones are well known to us. And that your name is not Voranchek, but Erlach, and that your blood-family, whom I can itemise in detail if you really wish me to, currently reside in sector 45e of the settled inner urban zone without anything like the appropriate paperwork. And finally, you might like to reflect that, knowing all this, and having as much resource as we clearly have, it might be best to count your blessings, take the payment you have been given, and never mention this to anyone else for as long as your gilded existence here continues to be tolerated.’

  Voranchek hesitated. A smile flickered across his thin lips, then died, as if he were trying to work out how seriously to take that. Ophar never let his eyes drop, but waited patiently.

  ‘See, if you put it like that–’

  ‘I’ll be going now. Ensure that any copies of this are destroyed. Do not have me followed, and do not speak of this to anyone. I think we understand one another.’

  Voranchek nodded, then leaned forwards, elbows on the table, as if he wanted to whisper something. ‘Just tell me one thing,’ he said, quietly. ‘I saw what was in the manifests.
I can’t un-see them. What in hell are they coming in for? How much could they – anybody – possibly need?’

  Ophar stood up, stowing the slate within his robes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, making ready to leave. ‘That’s the problem.’

  Kandawire was small, even by the standards of the baseline species. She was in relatively poor physical condition, a result of a fondness for cocoa-based confections and a disdain for exercise. Her fat-muscle ratio was suboptimal, her blood pressure far too high.

  The man before her – if he could even be called a man – was comfortably twice her height. The outline of his body, visible under the linen of his robes, looked so unyielding it might just as well have been rockcrete. Their chairs were almost comically out of proportion – hers modest, his carved like a Gyptian ­faraoh’s. The disparity was so enormous that, after a while, it ceased to be noticeable.

  Of all of it, though, his face was the most unsettling thing. She had never witnessed him truly up-close before, and certain expectations became hard to sustain. He did not have the kind of face she expected – it was slim, with youthful lines. His head was shaved, exposing a small augmetic bead high up on the right side. Like everything else about him, it was understated, exquisitely formed.

  He waited for her to speak again, holding himself perfectly still. It was hard to detect whether his chest was even moving enough to account for the drawing in of oxygen.

  Surely he had to breathe? Surely they couldn’t genecraft that out of them?

  ‘I have a recording device,’ she said. ‘I would like to use it.’

  ‘Understood. Please place it where I can see it.’

  Kandawire retrieved it – a smooth disc, a centimetre across – and placed it on the arm of the chair.

  ‘This is about process,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that is what your staff told mine.’

  ‘We live in perilous times. We cannot go back to the way things were.’

  ‘Agreed, on both counts.’

  ‘As the representative of civilian government, the counterweight to the military orders, it is imperative that things are not hidden, that all is made plain between us.’

  ‘Madam High Lord,’ said Valdor, ‘all of this has already been determined. We are short of time. As I say, what do you wish to know?’

  Kandawire found herself strangely reluctant to begin, now that the moment had come. It was as if, having come so far, reaching the end was something to be swerved away from.

  She gestured to the disc, and it pulsed into a soft standby light.

  ‘I would like to begin with Maulland Sen,’ she said.

  ‘Maulland Sen,’ Valdor replied. ‘That is not a name I recall with any fondness.’

  Five

  -- Transcript begins --

  Maulland Sen. That is not a name I recall with any fondness. Few remember it now at all, outside the Order.

  [How many years ago?]

  One hundred and twenty-six. More than a mortal lifetime.

  [Not something that affects you, I suppose.]

  Not in the same way. It was a confederacy of states. They had banded together during the worst years of anarchy. The climate is severe in those latitudes – that was also a factor. In those days, the weather satellites were all destroyed, and the winters had become punishing. Some form of association would have been required to avoid substantive depopulation, just as in other areas of the globe where the structures of civilisation had degraded beyond recall.

  I remember the rock. It was black, like oil. The skies were heavy, and there were storms every day of the campaign, as if the heavens themselves were set against us. Equipment froze before we could use it. At every dawn we would have to light fires under the engines of the transports before we could use them. And the wind. It was like a scream, never ceasing.

  [Tell me of the campaign orders. The preliminaries.]

  This was in the early years of active expansion. The Emperor’s plans had been in progress for decades by then, but we had not shown our hand openly in many places. Our stated territorial holdings were modest – enough to guarantee access to the materials we needed, and to impose a cordon around the sites where our researches needed to be protected. Only when these were fully secured and our forces mustered in numbers could we advance without the stealth we had previously employed.

  Maulland Sen was not the first kingdom we conquered – it was too far from our established centres of control. However, I believe He had marked it out for particular attention from the start. In a world of abominations, it nevertheless stood out. We had heard all the stories and had studied the spies’ reports. And He knew the place. He had been there before.

  [For the transcript, by ‘He’, you mean–]

  The Emperor. Of course. He was fully aware of the practices conducted there and wished to eradicate them as soon as He had the power to. That was always the principal objective, you understand, even in those early years. We were not simply fighting for territory – we were fighting to remove the taint of sorcery from Terra. I see your smile. Again, this is now not widely understood. A consequence of our success, I suppose. Say ‘sorcery’ now, and you will provoke a laugh of disbelief, but during the anarchy, all manner of beliefs were held, which led many into moral corruption. The human soul, if left untended, tends to moral corruption, and that opens doors. This world had been left untended for a very long time. Many doors had been left open.

  Maulland Sen was a kingdom of witches at the roof of the world. A realm closer to a nightmare would be hard to imagine. It combined all that was worst about the darkened age – there was no law, no regulation of the powerful, no true science, a wilful indulgence of excess and ignorance. They had retained scraps of knowledge, and put them to foul uses, giving them a veneer of military might. But it was fragile, and was already beginning to come apart even as we marched on it. I considered it like a great ash tree of the region’s long-forgotten myths, its trunk iron-strong but its heart eaten away by rot. He knew it could be destroyed, even when other advisers counselled caution. So the order was given, and so, indeed, it transpired.

  You asked for details. The campaign was one of the first in which we deployed significant numbers of the Legiones Cataegis alongside our regular troops. It was not their first engagement, but I believe it was the first in which an entire Legio was deployed. In this case, He chose the Fourth, given the cognomen at the time ‘Iron Lords’. They were specialists in siegecraft, through both training and genecraft. Other Legiones, at that stage, had not reached full battle-readiness, but they were one of the first, and had impressed Him with their preparedness.

  Alongside the Cataegis we were able to muster twenty-two regiments of standard troops. By then the Imperial Army was being organised into divisions by climatic zone, for the vagaries of the planet’s weather were a major impediment to true global conquest, and we were able to call on cold-weather specialists. The majority of the forces we took with us were equipped with suitable armour and had access to modified weaponry. This was a necessity, rather than a luxury. Conditions were such that a human exposed to the elements without technological aid – or other, proscribed protective methods – died within hours. As I said, it was a hellish place. I often wondered what had enabled life to cling on there at all. We found our answer when we got there.

  And then there was the Legio Custodes. Thirty warriors came with me, all assigned to protective duties. It was not anticipated that we would play the leading part in the fighting. Maulland Sen was, in many ways, a trial for the Cataegis. We wished to see if they could be as lethal en masse as they had already been in their smaller formations.

  [You do not give them their familiar name.]

  I can, if you wish me to. Thunder Warrior is merely the Low Gothic form.

  [Tell me of their primarch.]

  Their commander? I am not sure why you ask. Init
ially the fighting divisions had been envisaged as somewhat smaller than they eventually became, and thus the ranks were organised on orthodox regimental lines. The primarch was equivalent to the captain-general rank in broad terms, responsible for the discipline and conduct of the entire Legio. He was not physically different to any of his troops, but had distinguished himself in combat and leadership, and was appointed directly by the Emperor. His equipment was given particular attention, but you must remember that we were innovating all the time. Technologies were being rediscovered, or recreated, every year. Some troops were marching to war in fine armour, others were in generation-old fatigues. The primarchs and their command groups naturally were given the best of what we had. There were twenty of them in conception, one for each planned Legio, although by that stage not all had been given the title.

  This primarch of the Fourth was Ushotan. He was a superlative warrior, and a fine general. In most respects, I admired him very much.

  [Tell me of the fighting.]

  You know the histories. They are accurate. Records of all the major engagements have been deposited within the Tower, and these are available to you. What more can I tell you?

  [How it was to be there, as a witness.]

  I see.

  I take no pleasure, nor do I experience dismay, in combat. That was not the case with either our enemy or Ushotan’s warriors. They were both ferocious. Our enemy was called the Priest-King. It was a name he had given himself, one which was perfectly appropriate. His followers were fanatical, deranged by both combat-narcotics and by the delusions he fed them. Somehow, even in that frigid waste, they had laid hands on technology from the forgotten age, and had learned, or been shown, how to use it. The results were despicable. We were fighting men stitched together into mockeries of the human form. Some were encased in machines, and goaded into war with pain amplifiers. Most of those we encountered, to one degree or another, had been shaped into new forms, swapping their dignity for a feral kind of strength.