‘What?’ The question came from nowhere, and in its wake Leon felt unsettled. ‘No! I mean…’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘The Emperor and the primarchs are not like us.’ The idea seemed ludicrous.
‘No?’ Mendacs went back to his sketching, the stylus moving over the screen in small flicks of motion. ‘Even those who transcend humanity must stem from it. The bonds of family, of brotherhood and fatherhood… They still exist in them. They cannot escape such truths.’ The remembrancer looked back at him. ‘Just like you, Leon. It is something that all men must face. The question: May I defy my father?’
‘The Warmaster’s defiance has cost the lives of millions,’ Leon blurted.
Mendacs looked away again. ‘All choices have their price.’
+++Broadcast Plus Twenty-Two Hours [Solar]+++
LEON CROUCHED BY the windowsill, the lights in his room doused, straining to listen. From the township proper, the sounds of breaking glass and the crack of gunfire echoed up towards him. He felt hollow inside, watching the plumes of black smoke rising into the night sky. The faint glow of fires was visible through the lines of the alleyways; he guessed that the general store was burning, but he couldn’t understand why anyone would have wanted to put it to the torch.
It was hours since his father had left, ordering him on no account to leave the dormitory house. Ames didn’t know that his son had seen him pick up the revolver he hid in the cellar, and tuck it into his waistband before he went. Leon tried to understand what that might mean. Why would his Da need a weapon, unless he knew that danger was coming to Forty-Four? Or was there another reason? Another kind of threat?
Leon’s hands knitted and he looked around the room, the faint light throwing shadows over his pictures. He wanted to dosomething, but he didn’t know what it might be. None of his books or his drawings could give him any kind of answer.
Then he heard the door close downstairs. Leon blinked and peered back out of the window; that seemed wrong. Had his father returned?
Instead, he saw a shape in motion through the places where the light from the township didn’t fall, slipping away from the house. The figure was careful to stay in the shadows at all times, never once passing into the light.
It could only have been Mendacs; but the man moved in a way Leon had never seen before, almost as if his entire body language had gone through a subtle shift. On an impulse he couldn’t quite grasp, the youth scrambled to his feet and went after him.
THE REMEMBRANCER’S COURSE skirted the edges of the township, and having lived his entire life within its confines, Leon soon knew where Mendacs was heading. The alleyways and cut-backs the man took were part of the map of the youth’s world, places where he had run as a child and played at games of Great Crusade with his friends.
Mendacs was heading for the base of the Skyhook, and his path avoided all the places where the citizens of Forty-Four were gathered. Keeping his distance, Leon tried not to let the sights around him distract him from the follow; but it was not easy to put aside the sounds of the fires and the screaming.
At the corner of the Adjunct, some men had been hung from the lamp posts, and they swayed in the wind, the fibre cord about their necks creaking. Leon recognised faces from the tavern up there, now bloated and pale. Along the top of the mainway, it looked as if people had built barricades, although he was too far away to be sure. Once or twice he spied small groups of people armed with anything that could be turned into a weapon, some stalking the streets, others hiding in wait as if looking for something to ambush. Windows were stove in on some houses; he saw one with the name of the Warmaster daubed across the front door. He couldn’t tell if it was as a warning or as a mark of hate. And at the westerly point, a telegraph pole had been cut down with chainsaws, lying where it fell with a mess of torn wires about the head of it.
Leon lost sight of Mendacs as the remembrancer approached the service block at the foot of the space elevator. He was distracted by a moment of angry shouting between two men that ended abruptly in the blast of a shot-rod. One of the voices was familiar to him: Kal Muudus, a neighbour from a few doors down the lane. He was yelling something about the Emperor, but his words were barely coherent.
A moment of real fear washed over Leon and it took all his will to stay where he was in the shadows, and not run pell-mell back to the dormitory house.
He stiffened, digging deep to find what small measure of courage he had. Leon’s world was collapsing around him as the day drew on, and in this instant of understanding, he questioned if Esquire Mendacs might have something to do with it. The tensions and unspoken discord between the settlers of Town Forty-Four had been there before Mendacs had arrived; but it was only after he came that they bubbled to the surface. Only after the remembrancer had taken residence had the darkness of the Great War out there seemed to reach its inky fingers towards the colony.
Leon drew himself up and sprinted the distance to the service blockhouse. The door was locked shut, but there was a narrow vent shaft up above it that the youth was skinny enough to enter.
HE EXPECTED TO be bombarded by the screams of alarms, but Leon dropped to the floor with only the clatter of his boots on the deck. He shrank into cover behind a cargo rig, but the sound of his arrival was lost in the steady background noise of the Skyhook’s inner workings.
Even with the troubles in Town Forty-Four, the mechanised elevator went on regardless, ignoring the human drama beyond as it continually ferried trains of cargo capsules up to the orbital transfer station. A part of Leon was dazzled by his own daring at penetrating the blockhouse, and doing it with so little effort – but then he recalled that everyone in the settlement had been drilled with the warning never to enter the chambers within. Not only would the machines in there likely kill them by accident, but to do so was a violation of the colonial charter. Those found guilty of that were reclassified as indentured helots and sent to the frozen polar zones, to work off a decade or two on a punishment detail. Fear of that reprisal had kept the place sacrosanct.
Now he was inside, Leon was fascinated by what he saw, the motion of the mech-arms, the rail points and the pod-trains. If an ant could have crawled inside a working rover engine, it might have experienced the same sights and sounds.
Movement drew his eye to a line of six empty capsules, their gull-wing hatches all open. At the front of the line, Mendacs was leaning over a control console, working at buttons and switches with deft, singular focus. At once, a siren gave a low hoot, and the train began to move forwards, the hatches slowly dropping to seal shut. Mendacs grabbed his bags and threw them into the closest pod, before stepping in after.
Leon came up out of the shadow as the train pulled away, the gaps left by the hatch doors growing smaller every second. He knew where the pods would be going, where Mendacs had to be going. Up, to the station, and off-world.
If he did nothing, he would never know why, would never know what was happening to his town and his colony. But the risk… the risk was more than he had ever known in his life.
He took it anyway. At the last possible second, Leon sprinted to the rearmost pod of the train and ducked under the closing hatch. The pod rang as the door sealed shut with a hiss of air.
The boy felt an abrupt shock of acceleration as the train moved onto the ascent rails; and then it settled onto a vertical rise and Leon tumbled into a corner, banging his head on an inner wall. Spirals of light behind his eyes followed him into darkness.
THE MODIFIED COGITATOR program did exactly what Mendacs wanted, shunting the cargo pods into a siding once they entered the transfer station, instead of moving the containers straight to unloading. He disembarked and gathered his gear, pausing only to throw a wry smile in the direction of the rear of the train, and then moved off.