Leon looked up and traced the lines of the telegraph cables with his gaze, the web of black threads dangling from the slender impact-plastic poles. The line of the weathered, bone-coloured masts led away out of the town and vanished across the endless landscape of barley fields. Beyond the limits of the settlement, the land was flat and featureless from horizon to horizon, broken only by the occasional steel finger of a silo or the lines of a railhead. It was a static, unchanging landscape, symbolic of the planet itself.
Virger-Mos II was an agri-world, a breadbasket colony so far off the axis of the core Imperial worlds that it was almost invisible; still, it was one of hundreds of similar planets that fed a hungry empire, and in that manner, perhaps it might be thought, to have some minor strategic value. But it was an isolated place in the Dominion of Storms, ranged in the deeps of the Ultima Segmentum. A remote, unimportant world that turned unnoticed by the rest of the galaxy. There were less than a million people living on the second planet’s wind-burned surface, all of them working in service to farms in one way or another.
And none of them could forget their place, especially those who lived in Forty-Four. Turning to face the other way, Leon’s view was immediately dominated by a tower of black shadow that rose from behind the service complex beyond the square, vanishing into the sky. Tipping his head back, the space elevator seemed to thin away to a thread’s diameter as it went towards orbit. Inside, automated systems that few human beings had ever seen worked without pause, gathering the cargo pods full of grain that arrived via the railheads on drone-trains, and carrying them up into space. The Skyhook was Town Forty-Four’s sole reason to exist; while there were farmers who nominally called it home, they kept mostly to their ranches. The settlement was for those whose lives revolved around the elevator and its operation; but in truth, their function was almost cosmetic.
Leon recalled one night, when his father, Ames, had come home from the tavern in his cups and offered the boy a gloomy lesson; he told him that the town had no reason to exist. Every system inside the Skyhook, from the cargo handlers to the complex mesh of diamond ropes that hoisted the pods towards space, was run by automata. Every soul in Forty-Four could die in their beds at once and the elevator would run on, taking the grain and raising it high to where cargo lighters could meet it in orbit. The lesson, Ames Kyyter had said, was that even when people deluded themselves into thinking they were important, the reverse was usually the truth.
The young man didn’t see it that way, though. He didn’t think of the shadow of the Skyhook as something to be detested, like his father did. The old man cast the tower like a monster, and he glared up at it each day, as if he was daring the orbital tether to snap and come down upon him. No, Leon saw it as a bridge to something greater, a monument to human endeavour. In the shadow he felt protected, as if somehow the aegis of the Emperor was captured in its shade.
He had felt that way until today.
Thoughts of his father drew Leon back down the shallow rise towards the dormitory house that had been owned by his family for seven generations. He was so intent on it that he wandered straight into a knot of people gripped in tense, emotive conversation.
‘It doesn’t matter what you think!’ Dallon Prael worked as a senior solarman out in the vane orchard, where the light from Virger-Mos’s bright yellow sun was captured and turned into power for the township. He was a large man, but his size was all illusion; Prael was flabby and lacked any muscle or stamina, as Leon had observed over spirited games of pushpull at the tavern. His chubby hands wove in the air. ‘We all heard the telegraph!’
Among the group, a handful of the assembled townsfolk gave Prael’s words nods of approval. But the man he was addressing grew a grimace across his face.
‘So what do you propose, Dallon?’ Silas Cincade put the question with force. ‘We stand around and fret?’ In contrast to the solarman, Cincade was tall and wiry, but his real strength was underneath his aspect. Silas’s elderly father owned the rover stables and his son worked maintenance on the vehicles there. Leon couldn’t recall a time when the man didn’t have grease-smeared hands or the scent of battery fluid about him.
Prael and Cincade were tavern-mates, but here and now that seemed irrelevant. This wasn’t an argument over politics at the bar-step, but something else, propelled by fear. The tension in the air was strong, like the crackle of pre-storm static. Leon began to wonder if the two men might come to blows; not a week’s end had passed in the last two years that someone had not caused an argument on the matter of the civil war, and this pair were often at the heart of it.
‘You would rather we stumble blindly?’ Prael was demanding. ‘I spoke to Yacio. He’s telling me that every other telegraph channel has gone black. No connections coming in, nothing but silence.’ He folded his arms. ‘What do you make of that, eh? That’s military doctrine, isn’t it? Cut the lines of communication.’
‘What do you know about soldiering?’ Cincade snapped back. ‘The only Imperial Army garrison is in Oh-One and you’ve never left this quad!’
‘I trained!’ Prael retorted hotly. ‘When the Imperial Army came here and showed us how to drill, I trained for the town watch!’
Cincade opened his hands. ‘That would be the watch we don’t have and never needed?’
‘Maybe we need it now!’ said one of the others, a ginger-haired man from the medicae’s office.
Prael nodded. ‘Aye! If I wasn’t here talking, I’d be dusting off my rifle!’
The mechanic rolled his eyes and caught sight of Leon, looking to him for support. The youth could only manage a tense shrug. ‘Look,’ said Cincade, trying to inject a note of calm into his voice. ‘You know how the air goes. Lines drop out all the time.’
In that, he was correct. Some peculiarity of the mineral-laced soil of the colony played havoc with vox-transmitters, meaning that communications were solely sent and received by telegraphic cables strung across the landscape, and here, up the side of the Skyhook. Without a wire, the towns on Virger-Mos II were reduced to using message riders or heliographs. The rich soil made it a wonder for growing crops, but the abrasion of it scoured the rockcrete walls of every building and made blackcough the colony’s worst killer. Sometimes the windborne powder was enough to chew through the shielded lines stretching across the countryside.
‘If the capital has gone quiet, there’s a rational explanation for it,’ Cincade went on.
A woman, red-faced with near hysteria, glared at him. ‘You can’t know that!’
‘We need to protect ourselves,’ said Prael. ‘That’s what we should be thinking about!’
Cincade grimaced. ‘All right, all right! How about this, then? I’ve got my trike in the stables. How about I drive out to Oh-One and find out what’s going on? I could be there and back before nightfall.’
‘It’s not safe.’ Leon said the words without thinking.
The mechanic shot him a look. ‘How do you know?’
‘The boy is right!’ Prael went on. ‘Throne and Blood, did you not hear the broadcast, Silas? The war–’
‘Is not our concern!’ Cincade replied. ‘We’re in the arse-end of the Imperium, where neither man nor primarch would bother to turn his gaze! So this sort of sorry panic is pointless. Better we find out what is happening from the colonial governor himself, yes?’ The man turned to Leon and gave him a light shove in the back. ‘Go on, son, get home. Look to your Da.’ He glanced up as he walked away. ‘And the same to the rest of you, too!’
Prael muttered something under his breath as the red-faced woman glared after the mechanic. ‘He’s always swanned around this town like he smells sweet,’ she grated. ‘Now the grease-monkey is giving orders?’