Memories of Broken Glass by Rob Young

Author:Rob Young
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2023-05-31T13:39:10+00:00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rob Young is a writer and graphic designer from Lancashire whose work for Black Library includes the novel Longshot and the short stories ‘The Roar of the Void’ and ‘Transplants’.

An extract from Longshot.

The city of Miracil burned.

Its red-bricked cathedrals of industry blackened and crumbled alongside broken hab-blocks, all long since abandoned by the city’s indentured classes. Manufactoria that had stood undaunted beneath Attruso’s corrosive atmosphere for millennia were felled by shells, orbital lance strikes and the grinding tracks of war machines. The Astra Militarum didn’t stop to consider the provenance of their enemy’s defences – they belonged to the enemy, so they must fall.

And fall they did, turning the air into a barely breathable haze in the perfectly gridded order of the manufactorum city, the fingerprints of the Adeptus Mechanicus clear in the obsessively ordered design of each street, plaza and thoroughfare. The empty-eyed skull emblem of the Mechanicus watched as acrid black smoke billowed out of shattered windows like blood into water, but with no breeze to carry it away it lingered in the air, drawing a false night over the western fringes of the city. Ash and dust mingled with the first flurries of filthy snow, carpeting the path of the Imperial advance with a murky grey slurry.

The Astra Militarum ground onward beneath it all, soldiers bleeding for every yard they clawed back from enemy hands. Their cries of anger and pain were lost beneath the constant barrage of artillery, drumming a staccato beat that seemed to shake the planet itself. Acts of individual heroism were so common that they went unremarked. A trooper armed with a flamer breaking cover as his fuel tank was punctured by a stray shot, saving the lives of his squadmates as he was immolated alone in the middle of the street. Another soldier diving in front of his commanding officer, taking the superheated plasma bolt that was meant for her and dying in agony as he fought to breathe through liquified lungs. A soldier dragging his oldest friend back to cover under withering enemy fire, honouring a promise not to let them die alone.

Amidst it all, a lone officer knelt in the scant cover offered by a tenement’s rubble-strewn roof, the southernmost corner of the building torn away to reveal the meagre lives once lived by its inhabitants. He held a pair of magnoculars to his eyes, straining for a better view from the building’s eastern edge.

The vox-bead in his ear crackled with a nearby signal, but he ignored it. His view finally settled on what he had been waiting for – the heat haze and smoke from the east cleared for a few tense heartbeats, revealing a distant bridge over an unseen river. Human forms were on the nearest bank, springing out of improvised cover to fire at glowing blue barricades set along the bridge’s length, their defenders holding their ground with bright bursts of fire from their own weapons.

He sighed as his vox-bead crackled again and ground his teeth.

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