The bunker was deep buried, part of a huge subterranean complex which was the size of a moderate town. Home to thousands of Administratum servants, servitors and military personnel, it was designed to withstand a direct atomic strike. It was also humid, crowded, and stinking, the condensation running in streams down the ferrocrete walls and the ventilation systems never quite adequate. A stone jungle, Dietrich thought it seemed, full of too many useless mouths. When real war came to this world, he would leave it behind gladly.
Above their heads, fifty million more people were enclosed within the circuit of the sprawling blast-walls. In manufactoria and atmosphere domes and soaring hive-scrapers the greatest concentration of humanity in the entire system lived and died. This was the teeming metropolis of Askai, capital of Ras Hanem, and chief city of the Kargad System.
A place which Dietrich had come to know and loathe intimately in the few months he had been here.
The heat blasted them as the vault doors opened, a malevolent dust-choked wind which made Commissar Von Arnim utter a swift curse and tug at the lapels of his leather overcoat. Dietrich sucked the hot air deep into his lungs, even as it dried the sweat on his face to a salty powder. He had been born on a desert planet on the other side of the Segmentum Obscurus, and this oven-bright atmosphere reminded him of his childhood.
Another reason to hate it.
‘We must brief the governor,’ Von Arnim said.
‘Protocol – yes I suppose we must, for all the good it’ll do. It never fails to amaze me, Ismail, how such mediocrity rises so high within the Imperial Administratum. Do you know what he was doing this morning? Designing a new uniform for his bodyguard. So important was this to him that he kept me kicking my heels for half an hour in his anteroom, being stared at by boys in scarlet tunics with lasguns as big as themselves. Soldiers! They still had their mother’s milk on their mouths.’
‘The Imperium decided to continue with the hierarchy it found when the planet was brought into compliance,’ the commissar said in a tired tone that intimated at the repetition of this conversation. ‘Riedling’s family have been rulers here for thousands of years, and it was not thought necessary to disrupt that tradition.’
‘There will be disruption aplenty in the next few weeks, and that painted ass will no doubt contribute to it,’ Dietrich snarled. He spat, his cotton-dry mouth producing a white gobbet of foam which the wind took away. ‘No matter. The thing is on our doorsteps now, and there will be no more politicking – just a soldier’s fight. We must have an orders group this evening, all heads of department–’
‘Including the Administratum?’
‘Damn it, yes. It’s their planet, after all. Were it not for that damned warp storm we wouldn’t be here at all.’
Von Arnim pursed his thin lips. ‘Perhaps now is the time to implement the course of action we discussed earlier, general.’
‘Martial law? I’d love to. But according to regulations I can only do so with Riedling’s cooperation. We are not yet under attack, and until the fighting begins my position is unclear. I command a regiment, but Marshal Veigh is leader of all the home-grown forces: five divisions.’
‘They are not the Imperial Guard,’ Von Arnim said with a sneer of contempt that made Dietrich smile.
‘I know, my friend. But remember, I was not ordered here to take command. It is mere happenstance that the 387th is on Ras Hanem at this time. I have been ordered to cooperate with the planetary authorities, not supplant them.’
‘When the bolts begin to fly, they will appoint you commander-in-chief, or I will know the reason why,’ Von Arnim said. ‘This world is too important to lose, and the 387th is by far the strongest formation upon it. There are precedents, general – I have made sure of it.’
‘Good. I should hate to lose my head to the Adeptus Arbites before I lose it to the cultists.’
‘You jest, so I shall let that comment go.’
‘Forgive me, Ismail, sometimes flippancy is all that stops me from tearing my hair out.’
‘What hair?’ Von Arnim asked, and Dietrich snorted with laughter, running one hand over his smooth scalp.
The sandstorms of the last few days had died down to a brown haze along the horizon, and there was even a hint of blue at the apex of the sky. Pollutants and dust so fogged the atmosphere of Ras Hanem that it was a rare thing to see, and Dietrich stared at it as the transport took him over the teeming bulk of the city towards the towering cloud that was the citadel, to the north-east.
To his right, four kilometres away, was the deep channel of the Koi River. In what passed for Ras Hanem’s wet season it would run with ochre-coloured water a metre deep and a kilometre wide, hugging the ravines and deep draws of the western bank, but now it was as dry as Dietrich’s throat, a wide, cracked, flat-bottomed valley with the cliff of the city’s blast-walls rearing up over it.
It was spanned by three bridges of graceful swooping sandstone which were millennia old, testament to a time when the river had existed in more than name. Beyond them was a sere yellow plain which stretched for dozens of kilometres to the east, until it was brought up short by the first rumpled foothills of the Koi-Niro Mountains.
It was under those mountains that the mineral wealth of Ras Hanem lay, buried deep in the bedrock of the planet. The mineworkings went down five kilometres, and buried highways now connected them to the city itself, rendering the ancient bridges redundant.
Closer to, the bulk of Askai itself was inelegant, ill-thought-out and badly designed. The city had formed along the banks of the Koi over many centuries of ad-hoc building, and sprawled in an ungainly corridor for over fifty kilometres. In the last millennium the Imperium’s engineers had, in a gargantuan feat, encircled all of this long snake of urban crush with two-hundred-metre-high blast-walls of reinforced ferrocrete, but in the years since, the city had continued to grow, and now whole districts lay beyond those walls; the famed adamantium gates of Askai had not been closed in living memory. They had become artefacts in their own right, emblazoned with the sun and swords of the Riedling family, and blessed time and again by priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, who revered them for their inviolability and ancient workmanship.
A congregation of the tech-priests were working on the gate mechanisms even now, trying to get the damned things to work.
An acrid cloud enveloped Dietrich for a moment and he cursed, while his pilot muttered apologies over the speeder’s vox.
‘Sorry, general, it’s hard to avoid over this part of the city.’
‘Just get us through it.’
The thick columns of black smoke rose from the foundries of the manufactoria day and night. The Imperial factoria employed eight million people in this city alone, and the Armaments District was almost a city unto itself, with its own inner walls and fortifications, its hive-slums and refectories, all supplied by a deep aquifer which ran under Askai in parallel with the Koi River.
Dietrich had lobbied for some of the manufactoria to switch to shell production for his tanks and artillery batteries, but so far the governor had refused, citing Administratum requirements and deadlines.
Perhaps the news, or rather the silence, from Dardrek, would reorder Riedling’s sense of priorities. Dietrich fervently hoped so. His regiment had enough of its own ammunition for one good engagement, no more.
We’re not even supposed to be here, he raged to himself. Were it not for the warp snaring our transports, we’d be in the middle of the Wendakhen campaign right now, fighting as part of the division.
He rubbed the smarting smoke and sand out of his eyes. Well, beggars would ride, if wishes were horses.
They passed the Armaments District, and ahead of them the tall shade of the citadel loomed out of the brown haze. At its foot was the spaceport, around which his regiment was encamped for the moment. He could just make out the long lines of vehicles parked neatly on the borders of the landing-fields, and the sight of them lifted his spirits. He had not commanded the 387th long, but they were a veteran formation, recently brought up to full strength for the shift to Wendakhen, and what he had seen of them thus far pleased him greatly.