stroke, they had said! A stroke had finally levelled old Heironymo! Salvador had been forced to inject his own tear glands with saline to make himself cry at the state funeral.
The weeping! The mass mourning! Fifty years ago, but still it gnawed at him! Why had the hivers loved the old bastard so dearly?
The chatter was there again, at the very boundary of his mind-impulse limit, like crows in a distant treeline at dawn, like insects in the grasslands at dusk.
Chattering…
The Shield? What are you saying about the Shield?
I am Salvador Sondar. Get out of my mind and—
The wasted body twitched and spasmed in the Iron Tank.
Outside, the servitors jiggled and jerked in sympathy.
The vast railhead terminal at Veyveyr Gate was a dank, blackened mess. Clouds of steam rolled like fog off the cooling rubble and tangled metal where millions of litres of fluid retardant had been sprayed on the incendiary fires to get them under control.
Major Jun Racine of the Vervun Primary moved between the struggling work teams and tried to supervise the clearance work. Tried… it was a joke. He had two hundred bodies, mostly enlisted men, but some Administratum labourers, as well as trackwrights and rolling-stock stewards from the Rail Guild. It was barely enough even to make a dent in destruction of this scale.
Racine was no structural engineer. Even with fourteen heavy tractors fitted with dozer blades at his disposal, there was no way he was going to meet House Command’s orders and get the railhead secure in three days. Great roof sections had slumped like collapsed egg-shell, and rockcrete pillars had crumpled and folded like soft candy-sticks. He was reluctant to instruct his men to dig out anything for fear of bringing more down. Already he had sent five men to the medical halls after a section of wall had toppled on them.
The air was wet and acrid, and water dripped down from every surface, pooling five centimetres deep on any open flooring.
Racine checked his data-slate again. The cold, basic schematics on its screen simply didn’t match anything here in real life. He couldn’t even locate the positions of the main power and gas-feed mains. Nearby, a rail tractor unit sat up-ended in a vast crater, its piston wheels dangling off its great black iron shape. What if fuel had leaked from it? Racine thought about leaked fuel, shorting electrics, spilling gas—even unexploded bombs—an awful lot. He did the maths and hated the answer he kept getting.
“Tough job, major,” said a voice from behind him.
Racine turned. The speaker was a short, bulky man in his fifties, black with grime and leaning on an axe-rack as a crutch. He had a serious eye-wound bandaged with a filthy strip of linen. But his clothes, as far as Racine could make out under the char and the dirt, were those of a smeltery gang boss.
“You shouldn’t be here, friend,” Racine said with a patient smile.
“None of us should,” Agun Soric replied, stomping forward. He stood beside Racine and they both gazed dismally out over the tangled ruins of the railhead towards the vast, looming shape of the gate and the Curtain Wall. It was a sea of rubble and debris, and Racine’s workforce moved like ants around the merest breakwaters of it.
“I didn’t ask for this. I’m sure you didn’t either,” Soric said.
“Gak, but that’s right! You from the refuges?”
“Name’s Soric, plant supervisor, Vervun Smeltery One.” Soric made a brief gesture over at the vast, ruined shell of the once-proud ore plant adjacent to the railhead. “I was in there when the shells took it. Quite a show.”
“I’ll bet. Get many out?”
Soric sucked air through his teeth and looked down, shaking his bullet-head. “Not nearly enough. Three hundred, maybe. Got ourselves places in a refuge—eventually. It was all a bit confused.”
Racine looked round at him, taking in the set power and simmering anger inside the hive worker. “What’s it like? I hear the refuges are choked to capacity.”
“It’s bad. Imagine this,” Soric pointed to the railhead destruction, “but the ruins are human, not rockcrete and ceramite. Supplies are short: food, clean water, medical aid. They’re doing their best, but you know—millions of homeless, most of them hurt, all of them scared.”
Racine shivered.
“I tried to get some aid for my workers, but they told me that all refugees were set on fourth-scale rations unless they were employed in the hive war effort. That might get them bumped up to third-scale, maybe even second.”
“Tough times…” Racine said and they fell silent.
“What if I could bring you close on three hundred eager workers? Willing types, I mean, workers who can haul and labour and who know a bit about shifting and managing loose debris?”
“To help out?”
“Gak, yes! My mob are sick of sitting on their arses in the refuge, doing nothing. We could help you make a job of this.”
Racine looked at him cautiously, trying to see if there was a trick. “For the good of the hive?” he smiled, questioningly.
“Yeah, for the good of the hive. And for the good of my workers, before they go crazy and lose morale. And I figure if we help you, you could put in a word. Maybe get us a better ration scale.”
Racine hesitated. His vox link was beeping. It would be a call from House Command, he was sure, asking for a progress report.
“I need to get this cleared, or at least a path cleared through it. My regiment have the gate blocked temporarily, but if the enemy hits us there, we need to have a secure wall of defence dug in, with supply lines and troop access. You and your mob help me do that, I’ll get your bloody ration scale for you.”
Soric smiled. He tucked the axe-rack crutch under his armpit so he could extend a dirty hand. Racine shook it.
“Vervun Smeltery One won’t let you down, major.”
The chronometer’s chime told him it was dawn, but even up here in the Mid Spine, there was little change in the light outside. The glow of the Shield and the smoke haze saw to that.
Amchanduste Worlin took breakfast in the observation bubble of his clan’s palace. He had risen earlier than any of his kin, though junior Guild Worlin clerics and servitors were already about, preparing the day’s work protocols.
In orange-silk night robes, he sat in a suspensor chair at the round mahogany table and consumed the breakfast his servants had brought him on a lacquered tray. The taster servitor had pronounced it safe and been dismissed. Worlin’s attention oscillated between the panoramic view of the city outside and the data-plate built into the table top where the morning news and situation bulletins threaded and interwove in clusters of glowing runes.
An egg soufflй, smoked fish, fresh fruit, toasted wheatcakes and a jug of caffeine. Not recommended emergency rations, Worlin knew, but what was the point of being a
