Killing Ground

'You want a drink?' asked Hanno.

'Of raquir? No, I think not. I don't think you should have any more either.'

'You're probably right, Daron, but what else is there?'

'There's duty,' said Nisato. 'You have yours and I have mine.'

'Duty?' barked Hanno, waving his hands around the bar. 'Look what duty's done for us. Made us the enemy on our own world, a world we fought and bled to win. Some prize, eh?'

'Keep your voice down, Hanno,' cautioned Nisato.

'Or what? You'll arrest me?'

'If I have to, yes. A night in the drunk tank might do you some good.'

'No,' said Hanno, 'there's only one thing that'll do me any good.'

'What's that?'

'This,' said Hanno, drawing an immaculately polished pistol from beneath his trench coat.

Nisato was instantly alert. 'What are you doing, Hanno? Put that away.'

Hanno reached into his trench coat again and pulled out something that gleamed gold beneath the flickering globes strung on looped wires from the corrugated metal roof of the bar. He tossed the object onto the bar, where it spun like a coin, rattling on the metal as the image of a fiery eagle wobbled on its golden surface.

'You still keep your medal?' asked Hanno.

'I never received one,' replied Nisato. 'I wasn't there.'

The medal ceased its rotation and lay flat on the greasy surface of the bar.

'Lucky you,' said Hanno, his eyes filling with tears. 'You don't see them then?'

'See who?'

'The burned ones… The ones… The dead?'

Hanno saw the confusion in Nisato's face and tried to speak, but the awful, unforgettable smell of seared human meat rose in his nostrils and the words died in his throat. He gagged, tasting ashen bone and smelling the acrid reek of promethium as though a soot-stained flame trooper stood right next to him.

You were there.

'Oh no… No, please…' he sobbed. 'Not again.'

'Hanno, what's the matter?' demanded Nisato, but Hanno could not reply. He looked around as searing flames leapt to life all around the bar, hot, yellow and unforgiving. As though fanned by some unseen wind, the flames displayed an appetite beyond measure and greedily devoured everything in their path with a whooshing roar. Within moments the entire bar was aflame and Hanno wept as he knew what would come next.

The patrons of the bar rose to their feet, clothes ablaze and faces transformed from surly and hostile to molten and agonised. Like some monstrous host of fiery elemental, they marched towards him, and Hanno turned to Daron Nisato, hoping against hope that the former commissar was seeing what he saw.

Daron Nisato was oblivious to the flaming carnage filling the bar, looking at him with an expression of worried concern and pity.

Hanno cried out as black smoke boiled from the ground, choking and reeking with chemical stink. Shadows moved through the haze like fiery marionettes jerking to the dance of some lunatic puppeteer.

He heard Daron Nisato's voice, but the words were lost to him as he saw a horrifyingly familiar form emerge from the smoke and fire, a girl child, no more than seven years old.

Her dress was ablaze and her arms were, as always, held out to him, as if seeking his affection or rescue. Her skin bubbled and popped, meat and fat running from her bones like molten rubber as her limbs creaked and contracted in the terrible heat.

'You were there,' said the little girl, her face a searing mass of bright flame that ate through her skull and into her brain-pan. A dreadful, spectral light filled her eyes, all that the fire had not yet dared to consume.

'I'm sorry,' said Hanno, as a suffocating wave of guilty remorse clamped his heart.

He drew in a deep breath and in the blink of an eye the inferno of the bar, the melting child and the burning men vanished. All was as it had been moments before. Hanno snatched at the bar to steady himself as the world spun crazily around him, his senses trying to reorient to normality in the wake of such horror.

'What the hell was that?' demanded Nisato beside him, completely unaware of the nightmarish things that Hanno had just experienced for the thousandth time. The enforcer took hold of his arm and said, 'Let's get out of here. You're coming with me.'

'No,' wept Hanno, shrugging off Nisato's grip, 'I'm not. I can't go on like this.'

'You can't,' agreed Nisato. 'That's why you need to come with me now.'

'No,' repeated Hanno, snatching up his pistol and the medal from the bar. 'There's only one place I'm going: Hell.'

Hanno Merbal thrust the pistol into his mouth and blew the back of his head off.

PART ONE REBIRTH

'I should never have believed that death had undone so many.'

ONE

Do people shape the planets they live on or do the planets shape them? The people of Mordian are melancholy and dour, the folk of Catachan pragmatic and hardy. Is this the result of the harsh climes and brutal necessities required for survival, or were the people who settled the planets in ages past already predisposed to those qualities? Can the character of a world affect an entire population or is the human soul stronger than mere geography?

Might an observer more naturally attribute a less malign disposition, a less frightful character, to those who walk unconcerned for their safety beneath the gilded archways of a shrine world than to those who huddle in the darkness of a world torn apart by war and rebellion?

Whatever the case, the solitary heaths, lonely mountains and strife-torn cities of Salinas would have provided an excellent study for any such observer.

* * *

Rain fell in soaking sheets from the grey, dusky skies: a fine smirr that hung like mist and made the quartz-rich mountainside glisten and sparkle. Flocks of shaggy herbivores fed on the long grasses of the low pastures, and dark thunderheads in the east gathered over the looming peaks.

Tumbling waterfalls gushed uproariously down black cliffs and the few withered trees that remained on the lower slopes surrounding a dead city bent and swayed like dancers before the driving wind that sheared down from the cloud-wreathed highlands. A brooding silence, like an awkward pause in a conversation, hung over the dead city, as though the landscape feared to intrude on its private sorrow. Rubble-choked streets wound their way between blackened buildings of twisted steel and tumbled stone, and ferns with rust and blood-coloured leaves grew thick in its empty boulevards.

Wind-weathered rock and spars of corroded metal lay where they had fallen, and the wind moaned as it gusted through empty windows and shattered doors, as though the city were giving vent to a long, drawn out death rattle.

People had once lived here. They had loved and fought and indulged in the thousands of dramas, both grand and intimate, common to all cities. Great celebrations, scandalous intrigues and bloody crimes had all played out here, but all such theatre had passed into history, though not from memory.

Hundreds of streets, avenues, thoroughfares and roads criss-crossed the empty city, wending their way through its desolation as though in search of someone to tread them once more. Open doors banged on frames, forlorn entreaties to a nameless visitor to enter and render the building purposeful once more. Rain ran in gurgling streams beside the cracked pavements, flowing from grates and gathering in pools where the land had subsided.

A tall church, its facade of stone scorched black and greasy, stood proud amid the ruins, as though whatever calamity had befallen the city had seen fit to spare the mighty edifice the worst of its attention. Tall spires cast long shadows over the city and the great eagle-winged pediment that had once sat proudly above the arched entrance now sagged in defeat, its wings dipped and streaked with green corrosion.