Last season, he had won the fuel concession from Guild Farnora, much to his clan’s delight. Thirty percent of the fuel imports from Vannick Hive, three whole pipelines, were under the direct control of Guild Worlin. He looked at the megalitre input figures on his data-slate, then made a few calculations as to how the market price per barrel would soar exponentially with each day of conflict. He’d done the sums several times already, but they pleased him.
“Guild sire?” His private clerk, Magnal, entered the bubble.
“What is it?”
“I was just preparing your itinerary for the day. You have a bond-meeting with the Guild Council at eleven.”
“I know.”
Magnal paused.
“Something else?”
“I… I brought you the directive from the Legislature last night. The one that ordered all fuel pipelines from Vannick closed off now our kin-hive has fallen. You… you do not seem to have authorised the closure, guild sire.”
“The closure…”
“All guilds controlling fuel are ordered to blow the pipes on the north shore and block any remaining stretches with rockcrete.” Magnal tried to show a data slate to Worlin, but the guilder shrugged it away diffidently. “Our work crews are standing by…”
“How much fuel have we stockpiled in our East Hass Storage facility?” Worlin asked.
Magnal muttered a considerable figure.
“And how much more is still coming through the pipe?”
Another murmur, a figure of magnitude.
Worlin nodded. “I deplore the loss of our Vannick cousins. But the fuel still comes through. It is the duty Guild Worlin owes to Vervunhive that we keep the pipes open for as long as there is a resource to be collected. I’ll shut the pipes the moment they run dry.”
“But the directive, guild sire…”
“Let me worry about that, Magnal. The flow may only last another day, another few hours. But if I close now, can you imagine the lost profits? Not good business, my friend. Not good at all.”
Magnal looked uncomfortable.
“They say there is a security issue here, guild sire…”
Worlin put down his caffeine cup. It hit the saucer a little too hard, making Magnal jump, though the kindly smile never left Worlin’s face. “I am not a stupid man, clerk. I take my responsibilities seriously, to the hive, to my clan. If I close the lines now, I would be derelict in my duties to both. Let the soldiery gain glory with their bravado at the war front. History will relate my bravery here, fighting for Vervunhive as only a merchant can.”
“Your name will be remembered, guild sire,” Magnal said and left the room.
Worlin sat for a while, tapping his silver sugar tongs on the edge of his saucer. There was no doubt about it.
He would have to kill Magnal too.
At the very southernmost edge of the outer habs and industry sectors, the great hive was a sky-filling dome of green light, pale in the morning sun, hazed by shell smoke.
Captain Olin Fencer of Vervun Primary crawled from his dug-out and blinked into the cold morning air. That air was still thick with the mingled reeks of thermite and fycelene, burning fuel and burned flesh. But there was something different about this morning. He couldn’t quite work out what it was.
Fencer’s squad of fifty troopers had been stationed at Outhab Southwest when the whole thing began. Vox links had been lost in the first wave of shelling and they had been able to do nothing but dig in and ride it out, as day after day of systematic bombardment flattened and ruptured the industrial outer city behind them.
There was no chance to retreat back into the hive, though Fencer knew millions of habbers in the district had fled that way. He had a post to hold. He was stationed at it with the thirty-three men remaining to him when Vegolain’s armoured column had rolled past down the Southern Highway, out into the grasslands. His squad had cheered them.
They’d been hiding in their bunkers, some weeping in rage or pain or dismay, that night when the broken remnants of the column had limped back in, heading for the city.
By then, he had twenty men left.
In the days that followed, Fencer had issued his own orders by necessity, as all links to House Command were broken. Indeed, he was sure no one in the hive believed there was anyone still alive out here. He had followed the edicts of the Vervun Primary emergency combat protocols to the letter, organising the digging of a series of trenches, supply lines and fortifications through the ruins of the outhabs, though the shelling still fell on them.
His first sergeant, Grosslyn, had mined the roadways and other teams had dug tank-traps and dead-snares. Despite the shelling, they had also raised a three hundred-metre bulwark of earth, filled an advance ditch with iron stakes and railing sections, and sandbagged three stubbers and two flamers into positions along the Highway.
All by the tenth day. By then, he had eighteen soldiers left.
Three more had died of wounds or disease by the fourteenth day, when the high-orbit flares of troopships told them Guard reinforcements were on their way planetside.
Now it was sunrise on the nineteenth day. Plastered in dust and blood, Fencer moved down the main trench position as his soldiers woke or took over guard duty from the weary night sentries.
But now he had sixty troops. Main Spine thought everything was levelled out here, everything dead, but they were wrong. Not everyone on the blasted outer habs had fled to the hive, though it must have seemed that way. Many stayed, too unwilling, too stubborn, or simply too frightened to move. As the days of bombardment continued, Fencer found men and women—and some children too—flocking to him from the ruins. He got the non-coms into any bunkers he had available and he set careful rationing. All able-bodied workers, of either sex, he recruited into his vanguard battalion.
They’d raised precious medical supplies from the infirmary unit of a bombed-out mine and they’d set up a field hospital in the ruins of a bakery, under the supervision of a teenage girl called Nessa who was a trainee nurse. They’d pilfered food supplies in the canteens of three ruined manufactories in the region. A VPHC Guard House on West Transit 567/kl had provided them with a stock of lasguns and small arms for the new recruits, as well as explosives and one of the flamers.
Fencer’s recruits had come from everywhere. He had under his command clerks who’d never held a weapon, loom workers with poor eyesight and shell-shocked habbers who were deaf and could only take orders visually.
The core of his recruits, the best of them, were twenty-one miners from Number Seventeen Deep Working, who had literally dug their way out of the ground after the main lift shaft of their facility had fallen.
Fencer bent low and hurried down the trench line, passing through blown-out house structures, under fallen derricks, along short communication tunnels the miners had dug to link his defences. Their expertise had been a godsend.
He reached the second stub emplacement at 567/kk and nodded to the crew. Corporal Gannen was making soup in his mess tin over a burner stove, while his crewmate, a loom-girl called Calie, scanned the horizon. They were a perfect example of the way necessity had made heroes of them all. Gannen was a trained stub-gunner, but better at ammo feeding than firing. The girl had proven to be a natural at handling the gun itself. So they swapped, the corporal conceding no pride that he now fed ammo to a loom-girl half his age.
Fencer moved on, passing two more guard points and found Gol Kolea in the corner nest, overlooking the highway. Kolea, the natural leader of the miners, was a big man, with great power in his upper body. He was sipping hot water from a battered tin cup, his lasgun at his side. Fencer intended to give him a brevet rank soon. The man had earned it. He had led his miners out of the dark, formed them into a cohesive work duty and done everything Fencer could have asked of them. And more besides. Kolea was driven by grim, intense fury against the Zoican foe. He had family in the hive, though he didn’t speak of them. Fencer was sure it was the thought of them that had galvanised Kolea to such efforts.
“Captain,” Kolea nodded as Fencer ducked in.
“Something’s wrong, Gol,” Fencer said. “Something’s different.”
The powerfully built miner grinned at him. “You haven’t noticed?” he asked.
“Noticed?”
“The shelling has stopped.”
Fencer was stunned. It had been so much a part of their daily life for the last fortnight or more, he hadn’t realised it had gone. Indeed, his ears were still ringing with remembered Shockwaves.
“Emperor save us!” he gasped. “I’m so stupid.”
He’d been awake for upwards of twenty minutes and it took a miner to tell him that they were no longer under fire.