Spark of Revolution by Gary Kloster

Author:Gary Kloster
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2020-10-05T08:08:16+00:00

9

The Blood Eyes had given Breaker an easy path back through their defences.

Climbing up the shaft White had pushed him down, Breaker Brass realised how lucky he was to have survived the fall. It didn’t take him long to find the right tunnel, and soon he’d lead Torque back to the heart of the Blood Eyes’ territory. To the place where he’d grown up, the factorum where he had spilled so much blood and sweat. Crouched beside a grate that led up into a shadowy corner of one of the factorum’s storerooms, he could feel those memories, stirred by the smell of the grease and steel of the ancient machines, the burning stench of molten iron. The heat, the noise, the bright ruddy light. He had left this place not that long ago, but it felt like a lifetime. This place hadn’t changed, but he had. And his new arms and legs were the least of it.

‘Well, here we are,’ Torque said, her face lit by the distant red glow. ‘Now what?’

‘Wait and watch,’ Breaker said. He itched to go, to shoulder the ripper gun and get this fight started – but his new brain, which he hated but still listened to, warned him about that. He needed to know what was going on out there. So he settled in the grimy tunnel beside the grate, ignoring the rats and rot grubs, and watched. Torque settled in beside him, pulling out some ration bars of hard-pressed corpse flour.

‘The factorum I grew up in wasn’t so bright,’ she said. ‘We didn’t have forges. We had presses, mostly. Giant ones that could shape a slab of plasteel into the side of a tank with one push. When those Cawdor raiders attacked, I remember Goliaths and ogryns fighting them between the presses. Then the Neck Snappers came…’ She trailed off, staring up at the grate for a long time. ‘There was an old ogryn. He was showing me how to work in the factorum. Teaching me to take over for him when he went to the food processors. When the Neck Snappers came and started killing everyone that moved, Cawdor and Goliath and ogryn… he shoved me down a hole like this. Told me to run. Last I saw of him, he was fighting a crowd of Cawdor, trying to keep them from jumping down the same hole. He wrestled them back, into one of the presses – and then one of the Neck Snappers hit the button and started it up.’

‘White?’ Breaker asked.

‘Does it matter?’ Torque said. ‘Anyone would have done it. And laughed the same way he did when the press opened back up and there was just–’ She stopped. ‘I’m a pacifist, Breaker Brass. Or at least I try to be, as crazy as that is in this terrible place. But sometimes I’m a bad one. I hope this little war of yours works out.’

Hours passed. Shifts changed. And then came the chance Breaker was waiting for. An ogryn came into the storage room, dragging a battered cart.

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