Iron Guard by Mark Clapham

Author:Mark Clapham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-07-12T23:00:00+00:00

NINE

Remember everything. Heinrik had to remember everything. It was his job, no his duty. That the man who had assigned him that duty, his lord and master, was rocking back and forwards on the floor, and would soon become a threat to Heinrik, did not relieve him of that duty.

In honour of the Machine-God, Heinrik opened up his augmetics, allowing the data to flow.

He needed to record, to recount what had happened, the demise of Belmos VII, the fall of his lifelong home, before he died.

But, as he faced his own death and that of his home planet, as the sound of screams and tearing machinery rattled down every corridor, as his master gurgled and giggled, Heinrik found his focus shifting not to the present, not to the last days, but to the day he had learned what death meant, then deeper still, going back into memories that had been augmented not by technology but by the changing effect of Heinrik’s own repeated remembrances, as his adult mind had turned each childhood recollection over and over, holding them close but also rewriting them with his adult awareness.

As they were brought forth one last time, Heinrik’s thoughts of those early, hard-to-recall days were burnt to the record, sealed in the datacore, inaccuracies and dreams included.

Heinrik’s parents died on the ninety-seventh day of the flood. He was six years old.

That was the day he first understood the finality of death, the meaning of change, when his childhood world was overturned. But that was not how it had started.

It started with the rains.

The rainy season started earlier that year, the rains more ferocious than any Heinrik had known in his short life to date.

Heinrik and his parents lived high in the workers’ habs, their small home facing out over the rest of the city-factory. The day the rains started, Heinrik looked out to find he could no longer see the city-factory spreading out below, but instead an endless grey murk stretched out, blurred by the splatters of water hitting the window.

For the first few days, it was a novelty, and even holding his thin pillow over his head to try and block out the sound of water impacting glass held a strange excitement for Heinrik.

After two weeks of the relentless rains hammering against the windows, the sky blackened so that day was indistinguishable from night, even Heinrik knew something was wrong.

Heinrik’s parents worked for someone called the Munitorum, somewhere down the mine. Every morning Heinrik’s mother walked him down the stairwell and across a walkway to the other hab-tower, where he would spend all day in a long, narrow room where children sat at lines of rickety desks, as a voice from the front of the room slowly intoned each lesson. They learnt to write and read, and of the glory of the God-Emperor.

As they learned each lesson through constant, numbing repetition they were supervised by the servitors, the half-metal dead-men, who walked up and down each line, lashing out at any child who moved when they shouldn’t.

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