TEEN: TEN SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT

[Beth Pavell]

TEN SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT

OR

THE MATTER OF EINORE

A Warhammer 40,000 cycle by Beth Pavell​

Preface
My first fanfiction was really Games Workshop fanfiction, stories set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, or very occasionally, its parent game Warhammer Fantasy. I didn't know the term 'fanfiction', and the narratives were all in the style of what peppered those 3rd edition (40k) codicies, short vignettes, barely more than a few hundred words long. Fanfiction morphed, eventually, into RPG with the release of Dark Heresy. Now the RPG too is a thing of the past I've come back full circle to fanfiction.

The concept of TEN SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT is that this is less a single story as a literary cycle, or mythos, a group of stories in the same setting dealing with recurring characters. The cycle is intended to make use of the diversity of setting inherent in a fandom based on a wargame, and a sprawling wargame with a magpie-like tendency to steal any cool idea or trope, at that. Individual stories will be Rated separately. On average the Rating will skew towards the higher end of the TEEN rating.

PART 1: DARK MILLENNIUM
1. IS IT NOT WORTHY
2. BACK TAXES

 

[Beth Pavell]

Spoiler: Rated TEEN. Content Warnings:

Rated TEEN for mild body horror. Contains a pandemic as a plot point.

IS IT NOT WORTHY​

“So vast have these Spinward Fiefdoms become, and so complete the conquests of His Divine Majesty’s armies, that it pleases this Council that a new Sector shall be founded, with all the agreements and blessings of the High Lords of Terra. And the various Domains of this Sector shall be ruled from golden Einor that is the seat of this Council by the will of the lords of Segmentum Ultima. They shall be named the Regions of Einore, to be the lordship of His Divine Majesty, the Emperor of Mankind, now and forever.”

If only a proclamation could make it so. In so many ways, overturning a hundred star systems with the fire and fury of a Crusade was the easy part. Keeping them took vigilance. Vigilance, and blood, and faith.

Carrow had seen what happened when His servants failed in their vigil.

When he was a child, he would look up a the stars in the night sky, and wonder: which one was Holy Terra? Later he’d learned that none of them were. The holy light of Sol was just too far away to see with the eye, with ordinary sight, at least. But in these rare moments, he still liked to look up at the stars, and imagine he could catch a glimpse of their ancient homeworld.

Carrow closed his eyes and tilted his head back. The warship’s repeatedly recirculated air tasted stale. The bridge was shrouded in gloom, all lumen globes dimmed to quarter-glow. Behind him the officers went about their duties in hushed voices, the sound swallowed by the vaulted ceiling, while servitors chanted snatches of prayer in machine-code. He reopened his eyes, watching the cold starlight glittering endlessly through the arched windows of the panoramic viewing bay. Boxes of green text unfolded in his vision, labelling the stars: Janovy, Samuil, Megatesca. He irritably blink-clicked them away. His cortex-implant had developed a habit of filling his vision with tangentially relevant data, in an effort to make itself useful.

The contemplative moment ruined, he lowered his gaze to the gothic bulk of the cruiser laid out before the bridge. His eyes were drawn, invariably, to the kilometres-long gun decks along the flanks. His cortex-implant wouldn’t leave them alone, identifying the batteries of tiered macrocannons, the Titanforce-pattern lance weapons on their city block-sized turrets. Huge as the cruiser was, the looming mass of the planet to starboard was vaster by far. Carrow had long become used to the sight of a planet from low orbit, how it filled a vista more completely than a mere mountain, the majesty of the sight diminished by familiarity.

“Inquisitor.”

There was only one man aboard this ship who would dare address him without a note of apprehension. He glanced sidelong at the red-robed tech-priest. “Magos Lycaeon.”

“Trivial denomination for your thoughts,” he said, buzzing the words out through a voice synthesiser.

“I’m clearing my mind.”

“Successfully?”

“No.”

The Magos stared at him with his heavy bionic eyes implanted tight onto the bone of his eye sockets. The lenses telescoped with a whirr as he unconsciously adjusted his focus. Carrow sometimes suspected that awkwardness was deliberate. Lycaeon had studied with the Divisio Psychologis before he’d joined the Biologis. He understood social cues very well for a high-ranking priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

“The Astronomican is brighter now.”

Lycaeon, inscrutable, said nothing.

“I started my career on Persepolis,” Carrow continued. “Segmentum Pacificus. Tens of thousands of light years away, I don’t know how many. Guarding against that which lies beyond in the Halo Zone, beyond the light of the Astronomican. Things that had slept for aeons, and would sleep for aeons longer, if we were lucky.

Lord Solar Macharius had wept when he saw those stars. They say he said to General Sejanus: ‘Is it not worthy of tears that, when the number of galaxies is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?’. Because on Ultima Macharia his armies would go no further, because they knew that without the Astronomican they were beyond the brink.

I earned my Inquisitorial Rosette on that world. But on the way back,” he paused in remembrance. “The voyage from Ultima Macharia took two years, we thought. A long time in the Empyrean for a short jump, but you must expect aberrations if you travel in the Halo Zone. But in this dimension, it took not two years, but five hundred. Backwards through time. Five hundred years, Lycaeon. Can you imagine it? Right now, at this very moment, Warmaster Solon is fighting to end the civil war in the sectors Macharius conquered. The Macharian Heresy! History any Persepolitan knows, and here I am a quarter of the galaxy away …”

Carrow allowed a tiny sigh. “The Astronomican is brighter now, but I know it will fade.”

“I believe.” Magos Lycaeon said slowly, “that one day the Emperor will descend from His Golden Throne, and everything will be as it was supposed to be.”

“The Emperor, Lycaeon? Not the Omnissiah?”

“The Mechanicus was never meant to rule supreme.”

He looked back at the planet, thinking. A backwater world, by the standards of this sub-sector. His cortex-implant lazily began identifying geographic features. There was now only one location Carrow was interested in – the city of Caromagnum, its grey footprint just visible from low orbit. The planetary defence force had it under siege, on Carrow’s orders. This was a planet fearing where the axe would fall. He had already decided to arrest the Arbites Marshal. It was ultimately his failure that had allowed the pandemic to take root. If he hadn’t been so obsessed with brutalising the lower orders for real or imagined sedition, he’d have seen what was spreading through the nobility. Floribunda cordyceps, Emperor’s teeth. He’d never expected to find it here. A neuro-parasitic plant from Megatesca, one that compels its host to attempt to infect new hosts in any way it can. A dangerous plant, certainly, one that had destroyed more than one settlement on Megatesca, but also one that almost never escaped off-world.

Until evidently, someone found a way to synthesise a psychotropic drug from the pollen.

He thought of the specimen prisoned in the brig. The first thing it had done was to try to puff a handful of dust-fine seeds in his face. The Floribunda tendrils were bound tight against its host’s cheek, rooted deep into the ear canal. Flowering was the last stage. The host had forgotten who it was, the parasite reducing its consciousness down to animal cunning and primal desires: grow, pollinate, seed. Sometimes it would lapse into brief moments of lucidity, when it would howl and curse and sob.

“The Conclave will not thank you for this,” Lycaeon warned.

“What would you have me do? There are not enough stormtroopers this side of Aquitaine to maintain a quarantine, not with the Adeptus Arbites compromised. I could requisition troops from Aquitaine or Celeritas, but tell me Magos, how far would the pandemic spread before they arrived?”

“Inquisitor?”

Carrow turned around – the captain was standing at a more than respectful distance.

“We stand ready,” he said.

“Do it.”

Lycaeon knew as well as he did – it would take months to bring in reinforcements, even assuming his rivals in Conclave didn’t try to block him. Inquisitors learned to think laterally. Some called it insanity. He turned his attention on the young man looking downcast and out of place among the Navy officers – not dishevelled but subdued, humbled in spite of his fine clothes. Carrow remembered the utterly bewildered expression on Lord Orson’s face on the occasion of his arrest. It was as if he’d never hitherto considered, not even understood that Sector law might apply to him, too.

To think. The stupidity. An entire city in the stranglehold of F. cordyceps, a planetary population under imminent threat – all for the sake of an exotic high.

“You will watch this!” he growled, dragging his lordship to the viewing bay.

Carrow pointed at the starboard gun deck. The fore lance turret was slowly revolving. Its three stubby barrels declined slightly. Carrow’s cortex-implant calculated what it was targeting.

“Lance turret tertius stands ready, Lord Captain, Imperator gloriam,” an officer announced.

“Please,” Lord Orson managed. “Inquisitor -”

A green text box unfolded in Carrow’s vision. Caromagnum. Quarantined by order of the Inquisition. Population 8,510,762 -

“Open fire, if you please.”

For Caromagnum, there was no warning. The laser discharge struck from a clear sky. Lord Orson’s mansion and everything else within eight kilometres was instantly and completely vaporised. The immense heat and pressure of the thermal pulse flattened every building in a 8000 square kilometre circle. Centuries of urbanisation, millions of people, annihilated in the blink of an eye - leaving behind a molten crater carved a hundred metres deep, ringed with a wasteland of pulverised wards. The suburbs were left ruined and cloaked in fire.

Inquisitor Carrow did not rescind the quarantine order, nor lift the siege. No help came to Caromagnum.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

If the Black Library published your 40k work, I would purchase it. It is superior.

 

[Beth Pavell]

Spoiler: Rated MATURE. Content Warnings:

Rated MATURE for:

• Strong Violence/Gore - Explicit depictions of violent death and injury.
• Abuse - One rape threat, implied/mentions of sexual abuse.

BACK TAXES​

Z-Rat swung her rat-hook before the vermin could escape down a pipe. Her mother had named her Ziapatra, but no-one cared about that any more. She drove the hook’s long spike into its hindquarters with a thud. The rat struggled and fought her desperately, trying to drag itself off the hook and to safety in the depths of the pipe. Z-Rat grunted, shifted her grip on the hook’s metre-long haft and hauled it out. An acrid stink hit her nostrils as the thing voided its bladder. It wasn’t the biggest rat she’d hooked this cycle, but at above seventy centimetres from nose to arse it was plenty strong.

“Give it up, you fucker,” she growled. She lost her patience, drew her laspistol, and put two blasts of hard light into it.

She tried to wipe her boots on its matted fur. The metal-panelled walls of the tunnel were blotchy with corrosion, illuminated by a gloom of bluish light from grimy glow-globes. The pipe was marked ‘57 Ablutoria Θ’. Signs like that would turn up in the underhive sometimes, and nobody ever knew what they were for. They said that up in the middle hive these signs still had meaning, but here they were just … there. Subtle hivemarks to distinguish one of the thousands of kilometres of dank underhive tunnels from any other. Z-Rat had lived in the underhive all her short life. She knew this patch of it pretty well – probably only the vermin knew it better. But no-one would ever know the secrets of the whole underhive, except the God-Emperor, and He wasn’t telling.

Z-Rat grabbed her knife, sawed off the rat’s tail, and tied it to her belt with the rest of them. About 260 centimetres of tails, she estimated, and it was a good estimate, because Z-Rat was paid by the tail length. Not good hunting, not bad. Shooting it had been a mistake; she ran on razor-thin margins. Z-Rat debated dragging the carcass back to the butchers, to cover the expense of charging the power pack.

It would be down-cycle soon. She’d better start back now anyway.

Severed tails wobbling from her belt like a sheaf of rubber hoses, Z-Rat stalked back towards the block, rat-hook held out in front of her, ready both to catch a rat or defend herself from one. They didn’t always run. Some twists and turns led her out into a wider street walled in brick. A hand-painted sign read: ‘Crowteeth 112m’. There was a gang tag next to it. 112 metres on, it opened onto the fore barren, a large, empty hall ten or twelve metres deep in front of Crowteeth. It should have been brightly lit, but the lamps were failing again, because the Concourse Bloods had taken the power house, and this was Downhive Baron territory. Gunfire rattled from somewhere, echoing through the underhive streets. Z-Rat froze momentarily. Too far off to worry about here.

Crowteeth’s main gate was open. The wall around it was tagged with ‘DHB’, over and over again. A bunch of gangers in blue patchwork cloaks were lounging about on a gallery overlooking the gate, with rifles in arm’s reach. Most of them just briefly glanced at her. One ganger went for his gun, but relaxed, with the air of a man who’s been startled by a cockroach and hopes no-one noticed.

‘cause it was only Z-Rat.

*​

The bar maid poured her another half-measure of vodka. Nobody else paid her any real attention, because she was only Z-Rat. Vermin hunters were tolerated, rather than accepted. The bar was dingy, filled with the smell of obscura smoke and a dull murmur of conversation.

Some ganger materialised from the smoky gloom. He must have been newly initiated – his cloak was still only one shade of blue. Straight-backed, clean shaven, face unblemished aside from a small scar on his chin. Handsome, in other words. For a moment Z-Rat assumed he was after a drink, but he wasn’t smiling at the bar maid. He was smiling. Handsome men didn’t smile at her. Z-Rat was scrawny, and bloodless, and her boots still smelled faintly of rat piss.

As he slowly leaned against the bar her eyes flickered to the gun holstered at his shoulder – not a utilitarian las like hers, but a big stub auto, almost big enough to be a handcannon.

She realised the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“Brave little rat, coming up in here thinking she don’t gotta pay,” he said.

“Man, I’m paid up on my dues!” she barked defensively. He was too close. God-Emperor, he was wearing scent from the middle hive, the cloying, foreign smell of it almost overpowering.

“I ain’t talkin’ about coin,” he purred. “Word is, your little slit don’t belong to no-one. As the great man said, one man’s trash …”

Z-Rat froze, no matter how much she wanted to go for her laspistol. She wondered how quickly he could draw from that shoulder holster. He was minted DHB: faster than her.

“Y-you wanna lose a hand,” she tried.

“Oh really? You gonna take it off, rat?”

Z-Rat nodded at a ganger holding court in the corner. His fur-trimmed cloak was a riot of blue shades. Even from across the room it was obvious he had half an eye on the bar. Gang bosses in Crowteeth didn’t like bar brawls interrupting their drinking. It was a gamble – they never cared about one-sided violence.

New-mint DHB gave the boss a wary look. “To be continued.”

The bar maid sidled up once he was out of sight. She’d stayed carefully quiet through the whole incident. “Z, how long you gonna keep holding out?”

“Back off, Blue,” Z-Rat snapped. Blue was tall and striking, named for the aquila tattoo spreadeagled across her nose and cheeks. She said it was better than an amulet for protection. Z-Rat wasn’t sure it worked in the way Blue thought it did, but gangers were a little less inclined to beat on a girl inked up sacred. Especially if it was in gang colours.

“Girls up above Boundary don’t got this shit,” she grumbled into her vodka.

“Yah, maybe, but what’s that gotta do with you?”

“I ain’t gonna be underhive forever.”

“What, you s’gonna be a middle hive girl? You?”

Z-Rat didn’t need to be told how things worked. Her mother had been a club dancer, but a pox had taken her looks, so they took her pole away and put a mop in her hand instead. Which was a good thing in the long run, because the Barons lost interest in her. Z-Rat existed under the radar till she was a teenager, but she saw how it all worked. Some gang or another would bleed you for coin, and most underhive women paid dues on their back as well. ‘Being on payroll’, it was sometimes called, as if the girls ever got anything out of it. Having a bigger payroll than the other ganger was all about status, same as bloody territory. If you were handy enough with a gun you might avoid that second tax, but girls always seemed to be first to catch a bullet.

She’d lived up near the Boundary once, after her mother died and when DHB power was at its zenith. She’d learned they did things differently, up above. They didn’t approve of gang war in the street, and when a gun battle did break out almost half the time the enforcers would actually break it up! They didn’t like underhivers, above Boundary. It was illegal to even be there unless you had an ID card, or something, even if you weren’t in a gang. She’d never heard of any underhivers making it up there, not permanent.

“And this life’s good enough for you, is it?” she demanded.

“It ain’t so bad. I’m not even his favourite. He just fucks me to make a point,” Blue said. “’sides -”

Z-Rat knew what she was going to say. “I ain’t gonna be underhive! I never said I was gonna be middle hive, neither.”

“Then you s’gonna be what? A ghost?”

“There’s another way out,” Z-Rat insisted. “Th’ Imperial Guard.”

“It’s your hive too! Protect it!” Blue quoted mockingly. Twice a year a recruitment gang would come down below Boundary, flying banners and armed to the balls. Their slogans never changed. They had recruitment fortresses on the Boundary, and made damn sure everyone knew where.

“Yah, keep laughing, Blue,” Z-Rat muttered. “The man on Terra don’t care if’n you’re underhive.”

Z-Rat left after two drinks. Two was all she could afford. The lamps were dimmed for down-cycle, the sullen orange glow not so much illuminating the dark as deepening the shadows.

There was a swish of a cloak in the darkness - Z-Rat tore her laspistol from its holster. She found herself staring, wide-eyed, down the barrel of a stub auto almost big enough to be a handcannon. Its handsome owner glared down at her with the barrel of her las shoved under his chin.

Nobody moved. Z-Rat hoped desperately he’d somehow go away.

“If’n you think about it,” he said eventually, “the only thing to do is drop weapons.”

He lowered his gun almost imperceptibly. She did likewise, keeping it trained on his neck. Slowly, with mutual distrust, they lowered their weapons to their sides.

“Quick on the draw,” he growled.

“I got to be to catch a rat.”

“You know I weren’t gonna kill you.”

“You weren’t gonna kill me,” she agreed.

He stared at her for an uncomfortably long interval. “How long do you think you can hold out, rat? If it ain’t me it’ll be some other Baron.”

“Yah, well, this cycle it ain’t you.”

Z-Rat stayed perfectly still, as if it would somehow stop him from attacking.

“Better grow eyes in the back of yo head,” he purred, stepping backwards into the shadow. “Or better yet, don’t. It’ll go down easier.”

As he retreated into the alley, Z-Rat knew he was right. It was give in or get out time.

*​

The cold metal of the wall pressed her clothes against her back. Sweat clung the fabric to her skin and prickled the nape of her neck. From the guttering the bloated face of a cherub gargoyle stared blankly down at her. A bedlam of gunfire split through the chilly air. Z-Rat cautiously peered round the corner – there, just on the other side of the plaza, was the broad stairway uphive to the next level. The recruitment fortress was on the other side of that. A bullet sparked off the wall just by her head, and she flattened herself back against it.

“Fuck! Fuck!” she whispered. So close, and there was a damn firefight in the way! Z-Rat clutched her lasgun to her chest like an amulet, a battered Mars MkIII short that now represented almost all the wealth she had in the world. The Imperial Guard liked lasguns. She’d had to paint over the gang tags and hammer the wire stock back into place. It was junk bought last-minute, but functional, she hoped.

Her plan had been to travel mostly during down-cycle and keep going non-stop till she crossed the Boundary. Somehow she’d ended up in the middle of a battle, less than a hundred metres from the fortress. The left of the plaza was held by another gang, Concourse Bloods, she thought. Opposite them were DHB, holed up in a café, or something. There was an MG rattling out there. She’d seen a man gutted by one, once. She didn’t dare look out again – the Bloods probably thought she was DHB.

“Ain’t gonna be no man’s cocksleeve!” Z-Rat growled. She checked her lasgun was still armed. A cross-district arterial split the plaza near the stairway – if she could just nose her way round she might be able to duck the firefight. Z-Rat hurried back down the tunnel away from the plaza. She slunk away down an alley, a dank passageway squished between the dilapidated façades of two hab blocks. Cramped sub-alleys branched off it at random like capillaries.

Footsteps, coming from a sub-alley. Z-Rat panicked. There was nothing to hide behind and nowhere to run to -

He noticed her almost immediately, a hulking brute of a ganger with a shotgun clamped under his arm. The alleyway strobed with laser fire. She hit him just once - the laser blasted a ragged hole in his cheek and cremated the bone beneath. There was the metallic tang of laser discharge, the frying meat stink of flash-burned flesh.

Z-Rat stared at him dead among the trash of the alley for a moment. She’d shot him through the face. She hadn’t meant to, but that’s what had happened. Z-Rat darted up some steps, trying to run quickly and quietly past rows of apartments, till the tunnel opened onto a catwalk. There was the ganger with the machine gun pouring fire down at the café. Z-Rat shrank back into the shadows of someone’s doorway. Ten metres separated her from the hab block on the other side. She watched the MG’s belt feed get shorter. Come on! Z-Rat glanced back down the tunnel. Come on!

The gun spat out the last bullet. Z-Rat scrambled out of cover. She sprayed a burst of las, and another. She was moving before his body hit the deck, chased by bullets and flickering las. She let out a strangled shriek, expecting a fatal shot at any instant.

Suddenly, a shadow over her head. Heart pounding, blood fizzing with adrenaline. Great God-Emperor, she was alive! Z-Rat hurried on – she didn’t want to risk lingering. A stairway led sharply down and out, twisting around the wall of a chapel. Z-Rat cautiously nosed out onto the arterial. The street was empty of people but for a few corpses. Abandoned trucks with shot-out windows dotted the road.

Z-Rat scurried into the cover of a truck – and nearly ran into a ganger girl coming the other way. There was an autopistol in her hand. They both froze. The girl stared at her open-mouthed. Her violet hair was tied back with a Bloods bandana.

The ganger suddenly hurled her autopistol at her face. In the split-second it took Z-Rat to flinch she was wrestling the lasgun from her hands. Z-Rat punched her in the eye. The girl lashed back at her with a snarl and they spilled over onto the asphalt. Z-Rat ended up on the bottom, pinned beneath her weight. There was the snap of a flick-knife opening. The girl stabbed down, stiletto flashing. Z-Rat grabbed her wrist with a flailing hand and arrested the knife’s descent. The girl pressed down hard, trying to drive the point into her chest by force of bicep as Z-Rat struggled to force it back.

The stiletto seemed to fill Z-Rat’s entire world. It was well maintained, the blade clean and sharp, shining cold and blue in the light. Z-Rat simultaneously tried to crane her right hand down to her knife and concentrate on fending off the bitter point even as it descended, centimetre by centimetre, towards her heart. They were both screaming, screaming with the effort of trying to kill and survive. It felt like her left arm might snap like a plastek tube under that pressure.

She dragged her knife free. The sickly tang of female sweat assaulted her nose, the sweet chemical smell of the ganger’s sweetened breath on her face. Z-Rat stabbed wildly over and over into her ribs, her breast, her armpit. The girl’s screams came out strangled as if they stuck in her throat. She collapsed her whole body weight onto her, gasping and spluttering as she died.

Z-Rat lay supine for a moment. She wasn’t the biggest ganger she’d killed this cycle, but she was plenty strong. Z-Rat shoved the girl’s body aside. Her flak jacket was steeped in blood. Some impulse led her to examine the girl’s autopistol. Empty. That’s why she’d thrown it. Z-Rat tossed it away, retrieving her own weapon. She left the girl as one more nameless corpse among many.

*​

Guardsman Hector Gerson, 64th Corrinto Interior Guard, expertly stifled a yawn. His bionic foot was phantom itching again. Gerson spent most of his watches standing in front of the gate, controlling his bladder and trying not to look at the banner hanging from the roof. It reminded him too much of Hill 43. They’d rallied around the regimental colours because there was nowhere left to run. They’d bled and died because they were Imperial Guard.

The recruitment fortress was sited at the end of a lofty processional. The outer walls were half a metre thickness of rockrete. The gates were reinforced plasteel, embossed with the winged skull emblem of the Departmento Munitorum. The processional was guarded by four laser volley gun turrets. Since you couldn’t get a tank down here, that meant it was impregnable. This was a good posting. Once he’d got to bellow ‘Step back from the Emperor’s guard!’ at the top of his lungs. And no-one had shot at him in over seven years.

When the girl stumbled towards the gate, he watched her for the sole reason that she was something new to look at. Usually the female scum that floated up from the underhive were more flamboyant. This one was mousy, scrawny even for an underhiver, clutching a much-abused MkIII. She was also soaked with blood. Gerson considered bellowing ‘Who goes there?’ for the look of the thing.

The girl tried to march up to the gate.

“My name is Ziapatra!” she declared. “And I wanna be minted IG!”