He didn’t see the boy, his one connection to an active cell; he didn’t look for him. The lessons were slow to learn, but anything or anyone watching him would see something pass between them, and then they’d both be in trouble. He knew the boy was there; a boy was always there, waiting for the next piece of the puzzle, the next message, the next order. No one knew who was giving the orders. Perdu didn’t know any of the boys’ names, and so far as he was aware, they didn’t know his. He didn’t even know if they were all boys. He didn’t know how many other ayatani priests were involved in resisting, either. He didn’t know how many cells there were in this hive, this agri-works, on this continent, or on the planet. Singular individuals had known these details once, but they were all gone, and those left behind had learned their lessons.
Perdu retreated. He was permanently in retreat. Virtually the entire planet was in retreat. There were rumours of fighting forces in one or two of the larger hives, guerilla stuff, mostly, but very little reliable information was available from one place to another; all comms-channels were under the control of the occupying forces, albeit their security wasn’t impenetrable, and leaks were exploited at every opportunity.
Communications were necessary to the smooth running of the agri-galleries out on the great plains of Reredos, where the land had been given over to food production for the occupying forces and for export off-world. They were feeding the enemy with the foetid purple slop, the fast-growing fleshy pods that putrefied almost before they ripened, spilling out the spores that were killing the stilt-men who tended the plants. They had once provided the finest cereal crops in the galaxy. There had been no compromising the product by hybridisation, no dwarfing, no genetic modifying for higher yields, and virtually no disease-resistance. Eighty per cent of production used to go to slab for the Emperor’s armies, but the rest, the glorious twenty per cent, had provided the raw materials for the foremost hop and barley brews in the Imperium for a thousand years.
The chest filters kept out the worst of the dust from the papery old-gene-stock hops that used to be grown in the galleries, and prevented the workforce breathing on the priceless crops. The best of the stilt-men were rewarded with augmetics that increased their agility and pushed up their quotas. Not only could they tend the tallest, most fragile reaches of the plants, but their telescopic shins could be extended so far that they could also cover vast acreages of the tunnels furthest from the habs and sinks without the need for polluting vehicles.
The great, arched galleries used to spread across the plains, clean and white and gleaming; now two-thirds of them were grey and carbonised, allowing little light in through their purple-stained covers, and the canker was spreading. The hops were long-gone, torn or burned out by the guards who patrolled the agri-works, the workforce toiling around and above them, elegant, fragile by comparison to the pale, angular, barely human beasts that were their keepers.
‘It’s out?’ asked the old man, slouching over a beaker of something that might once have seen the inside of a barrel that might once have held hop-brew, but not recently. The woman standing on the other side of the counter didn’t look at him; she turned the cloth once more around the cloudy glass in her hand and placed it on a shelf.
‘No,’ she said.
‘The chips?’ he asked, shielding the words between his mouth and the beaker he was lifting to it.
‘Passed,’ said the woman.
‘The boy?’ asked the old man as he lowered the beaker back to the counter.
‘No,’ said the woman, moving along the counter to another customer.
They had to get the damned things out of the galleries. More of the tunnels were being cleared for replanting, and the Emperor only knew what the new crop would do to them. The carbonisation would petrify them, or the spores would corrode them, and if not that, the by-products of so many deaths among the agri-workers and the mucus that the survivors scooped out of their filters every day could do just as much harm. They were the most important resource the resisters had, the key to bringing the Imperium to the planet’s rescue.
They couldn’t stay where they were, but getting them out was proving a slow and complex business. Just getting through the first part of the process, making the chips and getting them to the priest, had cost dearly, and time and resources were short.
He couldn’t ask why the priest hadn’t handed the chips to the boy, or what the priest planned to do with them. He was at two removed, so he didn’t even know the priest’s name, or anything about him. He’d return to the cell with nothing. He often did. Nothing had ever been quite so critical; no single thing had ever signified the salvation of the entire planet.
The lasrifle banged and bucked in Bedlo’s hands when it should have made a satisfying krak and held steady. He and his cell-mates had been inside the building for two days, out of sight of the excubitors and the glyfs, trying to turn themselves into an effective resisting force. Practice made perfect.
He issued instructions and advice, his voice sounding too loud between shots. Hand signals were better if the new recruits could learn them, but weapons familiarity was the real priority.
His gakking gun was defective. It was going to take him out as readily as it’d kill the enemy. He lifted the rifle away from his body, pulling the strap over his head, and threw it away in disgust.
‘That’s it,’ he shouted. ‘Debrief.’
Wescoe shouldered her long-las and left Bedlo to it. She’d been doing this for long enough to know what the debrief would involve, and she and Mallet took it in turns to patrol the perimeter of their practice area, to keep the kids safe while they learned how to resist. It was her turn.
Mallet picked up Bedlo’s offending lasrifle and began to strip it down. He said little or nothing, ever, but he knew arms, was obsessed with them. The war had been good to him, and the occupation better.
Bedlo had come to the cell almost by accident when his own, his third, had been destroyed in a skirmish: a stupid mistake caused by one of his cell-mates butting up against the enemy during a routine sweep of their hive quarter. The resulting firefight had taken out several of the enemy guard under a senior excubitor’s command, and, looking for retribution, the enemy had deployed a grenade launcher with great effect. The whole decrepit mess of the quarter had come crashing down, and when the excubitor had counted the bodies, and realised that Bedlo and one or two others had escaped, he set a hound loose.
Whoever the enemy butcher had been, and it was rumoured that he had direct links to the Archon, he’d been thorough. There was still no effective way to take out a wirewolf, and not much chance of avoiding one, either. So this was Bedlo’s fourth resistance cell, his first as leader; he’d only been with them a matter of weeks when they were almost wiped out. He’d jumped two places to take the lead, and began recruiting immediately. He had no idea how long Mallet had been with the cell, but the man was indestructible. He was a born fighter, but lacked the communication skills to lead effectively. Wescoe was effective, too, and clearly a veteran, but she shrank from command, and seemed happy enough for Bedlo to take the lead.