Inquisitor Numann adjusted his monocle to better examine the datachip in his hand. Retrieved from a wrecked 150-kilometer diameter starfort, it might tell him how that starfort died. Whatever had happened clearly occurred at least a few millennia ago, breaking off sections of the fort large enough to service a small fleet. Whatever it had originally looked like (presumably symmetrical, reminiscent of a grey, angular, spinning top), the fort was now an unaccountably misshapen and jagged conglomeration of metal and plasteel.

On discovery, scouting vessels had mapped the exterior. Craters large enough to house a battalion of infantry were littered across its surface. To Numann’s momentary surprise on reading the mapping reports, no craters significantly larger than these were found. Surprise, that is, until he realised that any larger “craters” had in fact just removed entire sections of the fort.

Early on in the investigation Neumann authorised an astropath to call the Mechanicus to join the investigation. A sizeable recovery fleet had showed up a few months later, sporting an honest-to-emperor Ark Mechanicus. The Archmagos leading the fleet, after launching a surprise boarding action against Numann’s own flagship and proceeding to wreck three decks’ worth of ongoing research, had greeted Numann by screeching at him in binary for several minutes. Only when Numann casually threatened to use his fleet to push the fort into a star did the Archmagos switch to gothic.

The Archmagos named himself Fracsun, and set about berating Numann’s “practically heretical” attempts at “revealing the secrets of the Omnissiah”. The conversation quickly became circular, as Numann reminded the Archmagos that investigation was the point of the inquisition, and the Archmagos started citing sector ordinances and historical treaties. After several hours of argument, culminating in conceding that the Archmagos should lead the investigation, Numann was finally treated to some actually useful information.

From what he could gather, between bitter ramblings about some sort of rivalry between the Mars and Agrippa forgeworlds (and periodical choruses of monotone chanting by the Archmagos’ entourage of priests), the Mechanicus was almost as clueless as he was. Fracsun was familiar with the design of the starfort, and knew that the template for its construction was obtained sometime around M32. But the fort itself was supposedly never constructed. Given the fort’s size, it could comfortably house several billion people. Far more if overcrowding was not a concern, less if the fort was meant to refit battlefleets.

By around this point in the conversation, Fracsun’s tech-priests had finished appropriating Numann’s research reports and had begun their own mapping of the fort’s exterior. According to their early estimates, whatever had wrecked the fort was both massive (obviously) and had happened sometime between M34 and M36. The system in which the fort was located had not had a significant recorded Mechanicus presence near the time of the fort’s destruction, and Mechanicus records did not indicate any presence earlier than M35. The Archmagos made it absolutely clear that any fort of this size would have been a major religious and logistical effort, making this lack of presence beyond unusual.

In the months following that exchange, Numann followed the progress of the Mechanicus’ exploration of the fort. The size of the station, combined with the aggravatingly superstitious procedures of the Mechanicus, made for extremely slow progress. Every airlock and automatic door had to be blessed, every control panel appeased, every broken lightbulb glazed with ointment. Fracsun refused to allow anything faster than walking pace to explore inside, which made even the more open-plan areas a slog.

Fracsun had promised to report anything of note directly to Numann, but Numann trusted the copper-obsessed Archmagos as much as he’d trust an alcoholic with amasec. He deployed several infiltrators as a variety of archaeologists, savants, and rogue traders to help prospect the fort, and then outright stationed any “interesting” areas with his own private army. Most of his work was simply keeping up with the tech-priests’ complaints.

Until now, that is. One of the infiltrators had followed an agitated-looking priest several kilometres into an unexplored part of the fort. That priest led the infiltrator to a small gathering of priests huddled around a large control panel they had evidently torn off its wall-mount. The infiltrator had watched for a few hours as the priests whispered prayers over it, took something out, and then scurried off somewhere. The infiltrator then inspected the panel for himself, and had retrieved the datachip now in Numann’s hands.

Numann finished inspecting the device – it was a small, flat, rectangular thing that fit comfortably into the palm of his hand. He pressed a button on the cogitator in front of him, which opened a slot just large enough to take the chip. Hoping this was the right thing to do with it, he pushed the datachip into the slot. It did not fit. He tried several more times, turning the chip upside down, pushing it in from different sides, and then trying to leverage it in with a nearby fork. After a moment of giving up, he forlornly tried putting it in at the same orientation he had tried the first time.

The cogitator swallowed the chip greedily, and started beeping and clicking. The screen in the centre of the console lit up with green lines and text, displaying a basic user interface. Numann pressed buttons at random until something opened up. It appeared to be a database of some sort. Numann trawled through a few screens’ worth of data, until he realised what it was: personnel records. Each record listed the estimated date of arrival on the fort, and the estimated date of departure. It also provided information on where the personnel had come from and what their roles were. It was now time to round up his Adminstratum contacts…

If Private Second Class Weart had ever had any expectations about his career in the Imperial Guard, getting stationed aboard a practically empty starfort had not featured. Despite his attempts at ignoring them, all the posters about the glories of victory in the Emperor’s name had sunk a particular image of war into his mind. An image such that, when he was finally press-ganged into service, he had naively hoped might at least be true.

He still hoped. Three months of basic training on a transport vessel, alongside twenty thousand other conscripts, had failed to tell him anything useful about war. The Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer, a small book made to tell a Guardsman how to do his job, had been worryingly vague about the things he might have to fight. He could run several kilometres with ease, carry heavy objects, and shoot a lasgun more-or-less straight. He knew what grenades were, despite never having seen one, and had spent three weeks learning about trench warfare. So far as he could tell, the Guard expected war to involve a lot of mud, a lot of smoke, and various immobile sheets of metal painted to look like aliens. But nobody had told him how to do guardsmaning while on a spacefort.

Just six days ago, his transport vessel had held a ceremony congratulating all the conscripts, on having become the 4,393rd Achillean Regiment. At that same ceremony, they were abruptly informed they would soon be arriving at their destination. The regiment’s newly-christened Non-Commissioned Officers (the bastards that had to run everything in the regiment despite not actually commanding it) had then been given reams of paper containing orders and assignment details, and were told to read it all. Just three days of preparation, marked by NCOs buried in incoherent paperwork, had passed before they docked.

Two days of hurriedly unloading all twenty thousand soldiers, their kit, and stocks of food, munitions, and administratum personnel had ensued. Crates of supplies had been carted out and dumped, seemingly at random, in whatever open spaces they could find. The soldiers, Weart included, had been rounded up into their combat units, and sent down various corridors in search of living quarters. So far as he could tell, nobody had any idea what they were supposed to be doing, where they were supposed to be going, or why the fort was completely deserted.

Every man and object had exited the ship through a massive corridor connected to one of the lower decks. This had proved to be several minutes’ walk long, made of nondescript grey-silver metal plate, and lit by white glow-globes at regular intervals. This in turn exited into a loading bay, half-filled with large metal storage containers, each of varying colours and markings. That loading bay seemed to be about as long and wide as the transport ship itself, though it only consisted of one fifteen-metre tall deck.

On the wall opposite the corridor, which some of the administrators had quickly realised was called a “boarding umbilical”, were a series of normal-looking human-access doors, and one much larger automatic gateway. The gateway was closed, comprising a left and right-side pair of sliding metal plates, which interlocked at the centre line. By sight, it seemed to line up exactly to the umbilical, and had similar proportions. The other doors – four of them, with one propped open by pins that descended from their bases into small openings in the floor – were manually operated. The open door led into a room clearly laid out to process new arrivals, with checking points and spaces to examine handheld luggage. That room had in turn led to – for lack of a better term for it – a street. And from there had been a poorly-lit urban sprawl of commercial outlets, garnished with all the “art” common to the inside of any imperial spacecraft.

The uncanny design of the entire commercial zone had tried to replicate as best as possible an open-air market that might be found in any planetary city centre. This meant that while the street-level was a series of overlarge enclosed corridors, it was lined with (and at places surrounded) distinct ‘buildings’. These had windows that overlooked the streets, which seemed to make the regiment’s commissioned officers (the ones who hadn’t been conscripted, and commanded the regiment) uncomfortable for some reason.

Weart, for his experience, had been assigned to “B-Company, 2nd Battalion”. Accompanied by a selection of people, almost all of whom he hadn’t bunked or trained with on the ship, he and the rest of the company had annexed a comfortably-sized (and empty) retail building some 200 metres from the outside of the loading bay’s main gate. And that was where he was now. Slouching near an open window – which made use of dusty metal sliding panels which could make an airtight seal when closed – and staring out at the hundreds of soldiers milling around in the mildly crowded commercial centre, shiftily navigating stacks of kit.

“Company B-2, calling all you morons in B-2!” Shouted a Captain that Weart didn’t know the name of. Dressed in the flat, grey-green button-topped dress and flat cap COs in the 4,393rd seemingly always wore, with a bronze-handled sword at his hip, the man marched into the centre of the crowded floor.

Dozens of heads started peering at the Captain through doorways, over tables, between stacks of kit, and from a nearby stairwell to the “ground floor” of the retail building. Several men were shaken awake by their comrades, and the general babble of movement and talking that had filled the previous two days died down.

“I am Captain Rogers, an’ I will be leading you sorry schmucks. I’m pretty sure most of B-2 isn’t actually here, so I’ll need some volunteers to go find the re-“ The sound of smashing glass, followed by a roar of laughter came from outside the building. “-st of B-2. And while you’re at it, tell everyone that’s not B-2 to shut it. You lot.” Rogers gestured vaguely at some of the more alert-looking conscripts in the room, and then jerked his right thumb in the direction of the stairs. The indicated soldiers promptly saluted and sodded off.

“I’d have you all at parade, but we don’t have a parade. What we have instead is orders from the Major ‘imself, to finally sort out this utter fething shambles. A- through D-2 is gonna stick on this deck and move east into this fort and start mapping it out. When we’ve done that, we’ll get some new quarters to kip in. Major reckons it don’t go very far in that direction, so it should be easy. Make sure you buddy up in your squads, and try to find your platoons’ lieutenant if you can. You have two hours to pack up-“ Rogers eyeballed some of the more under-dressed members of the company. “- and get dressed. Then we’re moving on out.” With that, the Captain marched out of the building and left the retail building of unorganised half-dressed and already-grimy conscripts to sort themselves out.

Much movement and fussing began as everyone tried to remember (or better, find) their paperwork and whoever it told them to be with. Sergeant Kovac, one of Weart’s new squadmates, poked Weart in the side of the face with a stubby finger. “Where’s yer hat?”

Weart started, glanced left and right, spotted his helmet under an empty shelving stack, and scrambled to put it on his head. Kovac stood up and roll-called his squad’s names before he got drowned out by every other NCO. The Achillean regiments were all hastily-constructed infantry regiments designed to do infantry things, which meant that every battalion, every company in each battalion, and every platoon in each company was made up of squaddies with lasguns and a distinct lack of support equipment. Squad Kovac at least had the good fortune to have a heavy stubber.

Among them was: Sergeant Kovac, a man with a face like an older brother; Corporal Jenkins, a man who looked like he didn’t know why he had been promoted; and five Privates whose names Weart knew he wasn’t likely to remember. The squad also had a rather scrawny Private named Able, who had the comedic misfortune to be the ammo-carrier for the squad’s final member: a beefy man named Smith, who carried the squad’s stubber. These latter two members were men Weart had actually trained with on the transporter, and knew to be reasonably competent.

Between Weart’s squad and, he suspected, the entire rest of the platoon, they had just one man with any combat experience. That man being the platoon’s Lieutenant – a man none of them had actually seen since disembarking. Kovac’s roll call quickly gave way to a wave of other squad leaders shouting over each other, and to a dawning realisation among his own squad.

“Ser’n’?” Asked Able, in a slightly nasal tone, shortening Kovac’s rank in the manner they all had picked up in training. “Which way’s east?”

[x] [x] [x] [x]

Departure got off without much trouble, save crowding at the retail building’s doorways and a complete lack of organisation. Until everyone moved out and got into their own little pieces of the fort, there simply was not enough space to retain orders of battle. Instead, Captain Rogers had everyone from B-2 form into a vague marching column on a first-man’s-first basis. The men at the lead were told to tell anyone in their way to get out of the way, and to keep marching if anyone failed to move. Needless to say, injuries were caused.

Squad Kovac placed somewhere in the middle of the column, and Weart – laden with full battle dress, a pack stuffed with field supplies and an all-weather sleeping blanket – had the misfortune of slipping over in puddles of blood from the surprising number of nosebleeds the column was making. Most people hadn’t bothered discussing their occupations before being conscripted, but Weart had always gotten the impression the recruiters just rode a freight elevator into the lower hive and grabbed the first few thousand men who didn’t hide properly.

The crowds of soldiers soon gave way to a dismantled barricade made from sandbags and scavenged metal plates, and from there was a hop, skip, and a jump into a 20-metre wide corridor leading into an increasingly poorly-lit network of rooms and side-corridors.

The relatively straightforward layout of the commercial zone they had started in had made the definition of “East” pretty obvious. The loading bay the transporter had docked into was now “North”, and everything else followed from that. He didn’t quite know what to make of the fact that the commercial zone turned out to cover three decks, not one, connected by a nearly central stairwell. Presumably there was also an “up” and “down” set of direction, like with hive cities.

Every so often, runners from the administratum – equipped as they always had been with sidearms in case the conscripts got any “ideas” – would move up and down the column to relay information to battalion command somewhere at the rear, or to split squads of soldiers off. Those that split off were given boxes of chalk to mark directions and pathways from the main corridor, and were seemingly given free reign to wander wherever they liked.

Smith’s naturally overly-loud voice called out from behind Weart, “Ser’n’ – why aren’t they actually tryna keep an eye on us like they did in training?”

“Probably because each of us only has twenty-four hours of rations. If we run off, we starve.”

“What’s stopping us from just taking more rations?”

“The commissarial guard keep the food in the same place they’re bunking – right in the er…” Kovac paused for a moment to think. “…North-West corner of the loading bay. Anyone tries anything, they’ll know.”

Marching continued. The column was getting thinner as 2nd Battalion peeled off in all directions. By this point many had switched on their helmet’s tac-lights to see. Not that there was much to look at. The corridor was dead straight, everything to the left and right came off at 45 or 90-degree angles, all the walls were the same Munitorum-issue grey metal plate, all the floors a textured variant. Black and red-sheathed cables lined the ceiling, stapled into place at times by two-inch-wide metal strips. The occasional control panel turned up, usually inactive, but sometimes glowing green through its viewscreen or behind its buttons.

Then was Squad Kovac’s turn to peel off. They had been getting steadily nearer the front of the column for some while now, and it had just started to sink in how big, empty, and dark this place was. All they could see ahead of them was a receding wall of darkness at the edge of the white torchlight. A balding, brown-robed, administratum adept accosted them from behind, asked for Sergeant Kovac, handed over a box of chalk, and said “you’re to take the next left” before sinking back several paces to the right of the column.

Weart couldn’t see anything that made this new corridor notable, other than it having been a while since anyone had been sent down a left. Kovac took point, lasgun at the ready (albeit stiffly shouldered). Corporal Jenkins took the chalk, and made some markings at the start of the corridor. Smith and Able kept to the rear, and Weart – wisely, in his own mind – opted to stay near Smith and his heavy stubber, leaving the remaining five members of the squad ahead of him. This corridor was smaller than the one they had just left, likely the equivalent of a one-way street. The fact that it kept the same 15-metre-high ceiling only served to make it creepy.

The first few dozen metres of the corridor were, left and right, lined only with solid metal sheets, and this gave the unfortunate impression that the walls were closing in if anyone looked ahead or behind. This was only made worse by the fact that the corridor descended at around a 30 degree angle after the first few metres, starting at a point where the corridor inexplicably bent to the right. Before long, however, the corridor levelled out into a surprisingly large square, which appeared to be the start of a residential district. By now it was becoming apparent that the regimental COs had no idea where they were.

The square – though it was closer to a rectangle – was somewhere around a third of the size of the loading bay they had docked at, and broke off into roads at various places in all directions, revealing a massive series of hab blocks. Each hab block was lined with doors, and given mild decoration to outline different floors and segments. The square was lined all around by metal scaffolds, which created new ‘floors’ at five and ten metres off the ground, in line with the doors (and yet more scaffolded walkways) of the buildings as they lined the roads. Stairs to the scaffolds littered the square and its roads, which had clearly been designed solely for pedestrian access.

From the southern side, on either side of the corridor the lead to the larger east-west corridor they had peeled off from, there appeared to be large civilian service venues. The squad tacked left from their entry point, and spread out a little to take advantage of the space. They curved their path further leftwards, until they followed a slightly curved path into a cul-de-sac of service buildings.

These were a mix of inlets into the walls, and overt mock buildings as had been common at the dock’s commercial zone. The squad, trying to look as professional and alert as it’s possible to be when you have no idea what you are doing, swept from one venue to another. Food outlets marked for every fast-food or long-storage fancy, medicae facilities still marked by dimly-glowing datascreens displaying exorbitant prices, and even a tanning salon.

One miniscule crevice, that looked like someone had dug out of the wall with little more than a powered saw and a servo-arm, led to an unstable-looking flight of scaffold-stairs that ended at a small walkway behind one of the service buildings. This had a door at the end bearing a placard that offered “personal massage therapy for the discerning gent.” The total lack of anything that could be described as “discerning” that Corporal Jenkins found behind the door settled a short debate amongst the squad about what kind of man a “discerning gent” really was.

These minor discoveries were amusing enough for the rest of the squad, but were starting to worry Weart. He kept this to himself, however, until the squad returned to the square proper and spotted, through the inky darkness that surrounded their light beams, a large set of stairs linking this deck to another one above… and another one below. His stomach began tingling with anticipation.

“Erm, just how big is this place? And how come regimental command clearly doesn’t know it?”

[x] [x] [x] [x]

The prospect of having to scout not just this deck, but two or more others did not strike much fancy in any of the squaddies. Having been wandering for some hours already, the lot of them were overly warm under their packs, and overly empty in their stomachs. Sergeant Kovac answered Weart’s question with a brief “they’re probably just screwing with us” and drew everyone’s attention to questions he could answer.

“If that’s what I think it is, that means this place is huge. And I don’t know about you lot, but I’m not going to start mapping everything out here until I’ve had lunch.”

Kovac led the squad to a dimly-glowing datascreen nearby, set down his pack, and opened the entrance to what looked like a low-grade bar. After a few moments inside he came back awkwardly dragging three metal barstools with him. Kovac’s eyes surveyed his squad as he returned. “Well don’t gawp, get comfy!”

Weart eyed one of the stools as it was placed down, and nearly blinded himself as the polished-by-use metal seat reflected his tac-light into his own eyes. He switched his off, and found his gesture repeated by the rest of the squad. This only served to make his momentary blindness last longer as the area around the screen went from bright and shiny to soft black and dark grey, overlayed by a strong green afterglow.

Weart, and presumably everyone else, sat down and began blindly rummaging through their packs. After a couple of minutes, his eyes adjusted to the green-grey light from the datascreen and he was able to find his ration box. One of the men whose names he could not remember spoke up as Weart tried vainly to read the unpackaging instructions.

“Why-“ a tearing noise sounded from the same direction as the voice “-feck. Why are we actually here? I mean, we got trained for trench fighting, and nobody said nothin’ about being on a space fort. And then when we get here nobody has a clue what they’re doing, and we’re all completely disorganised.”

A nasally-voiced Able replied, “Yeah ‘ow come? We docked a’ a place what ain’t big enough for the entire regimen’, an’ now we ‘ave to go scout everyfin’ out.”

Kovac made an admirable attempt to pretend to not be concerned. “I’d have to guess that we got redeployed at short notice. You all saw that passing-out ceremony. That happened halfway through fire-and-manoeuvre lectures – so it clearly wasn’t planned. I don’t know if any of you got a look in at the paperwork the corporal and I got, but we definitely weren’t ready to assign units and roles.”

The sound of an ammo belt for a heavy stubber clinked pointedly as someone shifted loudly in their seat. That rang true for Weart. Weapons distributions had been a hectic affair, with firearms pressed into soldiers' hands as fast as the armoury could get rid of them. Soldiers Weart knew had not trained for specialist weapons had walked away with man-portable ordnance that he would bet did not even have safeties on. Not to mention the number of people complaining about having too few lasgun power packs, or getting laden with too many entrenchment tools.

He pulled a plastic, vacuum-sealed bag of self-heating food out of the ration box, and bent the heating strips on the packaging until they crackled. He set that on top of his pack, which he had placed between his legs, and searched the ration box for cutlery.

Able piped up again, “So if we got redeployed, why is it to somewhere abandoned?”

This time Jenkins took the lead as – and by now Weart’s eyes had adjusted enough to see – Kovac started munching a protein bar. “Maybe it’s not abandoned. Maybe it’s full of ghooo-oo-oosts!” Jenkins warbled that last word for comedic effect, but only got bemused silence in response.

Several minutes of quiet munching soon ensued, as Weart found a disposable spork to attack what turned out to be something thick and curried. It tasted vaguely salty, vaguely spicy, and occasionally lumpy. The lumps, so far as he could tell, were an attempt at long-storage grox meat.

Another forgotten name then spoke, between mouthfuls of something that sounded thicker and drier than Weart’s meal. “I’ve been doing some maths, right?”

A moment of silence passed, which the speaker interpreted as assent. “I ran me some numbers, and I want you to tell me if I’ve got this wrong.” He paused for dramatic effect.
“There’s twenty thousand of us, plus about ten thousand support staff, and a few hundred Commissarial guys. We’ve been in flight for three months. Now I don’t know how densely food can be packaged, but I do know that I had to clean out the storage holds every night for the first three weeks. Now, I counted the rate that we got through food crates while I was cleaning. And then I counted the number of crates we probably actually stored.”

The man proceeded to detail a series of numbers, estimates, and ‘margins of error’ which Weart mostly ignored while the man got to his point. “So what I’m saying is that we got through between forty and sixty percent of our food before we got here. Over three months. Which means that unless we get resupplied, at the current rate… we only have two to four-and-a-half months of food left.”

The squad remained silent for several moments, long enough for the man to get to his point more clearly. “If we don’t get more food soon, we’re going to starve.”

Silent eating continued, now with a strangely stressed atmosphere. Even if that was the case, thought Weart, the Militarum would not just deploy an entire regiment of soldiers to somewhere and then forget to supply them. Probably, he thought to himself, there was a supply ship that had been following them all this time and would dock in a week or two. He did not really want to think about the alternatives, stuck in somewhere with almost no functioning lights, and so far as their scouting had found, no food supplies…

A sharp, metallic, thunk-ing sound started in the distance, repeating roughly every half second.

Thunk

Thunk

Thunk

Thunk

The sound quickly grew louder, clearly getting closer, starting from somewhere beyond the square.

Sergeant Kovac scrabbled for, and then raised his lasgun, and aimed both it and his tac-light toward the central (northern) avenue of the residential buildings. The light did not quite reach the closest buildings, but Weart’s oversensitive eyes could, he thought, just about make out their outlines.

Thunk

Thunk

Thunk!

THUNK!

The noise ran quickly under the square, right down the middle, vibrations travelling up their feet and resonating in their chests. It travelled past them in the direction of the entryway corridor. The sound continued a few more times until-

Thunk

Thunk

DING!

The thunk-ing ended with a high-pitched noice, like a bell being rung – only to be stopped mid-note by someone placing a hand over it.

Weart looked to Kovac, Kovac looked to Jenkins. Jenkins looked at Kovac. Stools and packs were knocked over and rations abandoned as everyone grabbed their weapons and started moving. They broke into a sprint for the main corridor, leaving most of their kit behind and crossing the square in seconds. Thirty metres to safety – twenty – ten!

A booming screeching noise of stressed metal tore under them as the floor panels beneath them gave way. Voices cried out in the half-darkness as Weart felt solid ground under one foot, and then a falling sensation under his lead foot as his momentum carried him forward.