LEFT FOR DEAD
A Warhammer 40,000 story by Steve Lyons

The war on Parius Monumentus was over.
Hive Opus had been pried from the claws of depravity, thank the Emperor! Blessed order was finally restored.
The Astra Militarum could claim the victory. The local militia, chronically undermanned, had misjudged the spread of corruption; it had overtaken and overwhelmed them, forcing them to transmit an astropathic distress call.
A Death Korps of Krieg regiment had arrived to take control. For a full month, day and night, the sky had flashed and thundered to the relentless beat of their siege guns. The city’s walls had shuddered and inexorably crumbled. Its decadent captors had been put to flight – and then, most of them, to the sword.
The Korpsmen had departed, with other wars on other worlds to fight. Silence had settled in their wake – only long enough for the Emperor’s loyal subjects to breathe a collective prayer of relief. Then the real work had begun.
The sky now resounded with the roars of construction vehicles. The shattered debris of habs and factorums groaned beneath the weight of caterpillar tracks. The gilt-edged finery of the city’s cathedrals, reduced to fragments, was shovelled away by claw blades. Exposed guts of great mining machines spat and hissed and touched off fires.

Jarvan was a corporal in the Parius Interior Guard.
He was new to the rank, since his predecessor had been captured and butchered on an altar. He was eager to prove himself. He had charge of a labour gang, one of thousands: just under a hundred weary and traumatised civilians charged with sifting through the wreckage, recovering what they could. Whip-wielding servitors stood over them, encouraging them in these duties.
Thus it was that Corporal Jarvan encountered the stranger.
His labour gang was dragging bodies from a fallen hab-block.  They had found a number of survivors, yesterday. Not quite so many today. Tomorrow, they would be reassigned to a higher-priority area. Power was yet to be restored to this hive sector. Freestanding lumen-units coughed and sputtered out sprays of pale white light, between which lurked brooding shadows.
Jarvan turned his head at just the moment to see a shape flitting through those shadows. One with no right to be there. He snapped up his rifle with its flashlight attachment, pinpointing the figure of a man.
His skin was pale, as with any lower-level hive-dweller deprived of direct sunlight. He was young and wiry, with a military buzz cut. Jarvan’s eyes were immediately drawn to the lasgun in his hand, though the stranger wasn’t aiming it.
  ‘Drop the weapon! I said, drop it – down on your knees! Lace your hands behind your head!’ The stranger complied with each instruction in turn.
‘Identify yourself!’ the corporal demanded.
The stranger didn’t answer. He knelt, staring at Jarvan with dull eyes, unblinking. Jarvan thought he might be a soldier. He had the build and bearing of one, but no uniform. He wore a set of shapeless grey coveralls, singed, tattered and soiled.
‘Identify yourself,’ repeated Jarvan. ‘Name and rank?’
‘Don’t remember,’ said the stranger, each word catching in his throat. 
Drawing closer, Jarvan saw that the stranger’s head was cut. Blood had crusted around the wound and striped his cheek. He was probably concussed. The corporal motioned to the nearest of his labourers; he hadn’t bothered to remember their names or faces. He sent three of them to strip the stranger and search him. He didn’t resist.
One labourer brought the stranger’s weapon to Jarvan. At a glance, he could see that it wasn’t Parius issue. He had seen enough like it in recent weeks, however. The lasgun was modified to fire a more powerful shot, but at a cost. Extra sink rings had been fitted around its barrel to bleed off excess heat. It bore the stamp of the Imperial forges on Lucius, which made it Krieg property.
‘Where did you get this?’
The stranger didn’t answer him. His eyes remained fixed upon Jarvan as the labourers ran callused hands over him, searching for tattoos or mutations. They reported that the stranger was clean – and one of them had found his ident papers. At the corporal’s impatient urging, he read out the details, haltingly.
‘His name is, uh, Arvo, sir. Registered to Sector Gamma-Four-… this sector. He’s a menial, third-grade.’
Jarvan was almost disappointed. So much fuss, he thought, for a maintenance drudge. He must have taken the lasgun from a fallen trooper. Likely had no idea how to use it. Jarvan was minded to shoot him on the spot and save a medicae’s time and effort.
He lowered his rifle instead, crouching to inspect the stranger’s eyes. Clear enough, he judged. He straightened up, beckoning to his labourers again. ‘Take him to the medicae and be swift about it. Back in twenty minutes or I’ll have you both flogged.’ More than enough time had been wasted on distractions. He had no intention of missing his end-of-shift quotas.
The stranger was hauled out of Corporal Jarvan’s sight and, almost as quickly, faded from his thoughts.

The medicae facility was no quieter than anywhere else. The air buzzed with urgent shouts, rushing footsteps and the howls and screams and dying gurgles of the untended wounded.
In fact, the word ‘facility’ over-dignified this place: a makeshift camp strewn between the cranes and hoists of a broken-down factorum. A hundred drudges scrubbed the walls, only gradually eroding centuries of ingrained soot. Their mops swirled fresher vomit and blood about the floor. Haggard-looking medics stumbled between them, red-eyed and dishevelled, urgent pleas pulling them in all directions.
The man known as Arvo was dumped on a creaking gurney. He lay on his back and let the clamour wash over him. It merged with the ringing in his head to deny him the sleep he sorely needed. He breathed in the stench of infected and diseased bodies. Occasionally, he slipped into a fitful doze, to be woken by a gunshot. For many of his fellow patients, it appeared, a bullet to the brain was the most efficient treatment.
For hours, only two people showed Arvo any attention. The first was an Administratum clerk who checked his papers, tapped his details into a data-slate, clicked his tongue to himself and moved away. The second was a middle-aged woman, dripping piously with religious symbols, who searched him as the labourers at the hab-block had searched him, for signs of Chaos corruption.
In between these interruptions, his mind fled to the recent past.

Hive Opus had been split open, its cannons silenced. The Death Korps had risen from their trenches and surged forwards. They were strafed with small arms fire, to no avail. For every skull-masked figure cut down, two more appeared to replace him. Their advance continued, unstoppable. A tidal wave of screaming madness.
Their enemies were worshippers of Excess, wanton revellers in carnal pleasure. They possessed not a fraction of the Korpsmen’s iron discipline. In the face of the Emperor’s holy vengeance, they broke. Holes gaped open within the cultists’ masses, and the Korpsmen poured into these and widened them with guns, combat knives and the strength of their own sinews.
Arvo’s head rang to each beat of the battle. His ears had been deadened, his eyes flash-blinded by a bursting grenade. The stink of blood and fire, cordite and death assailed his nostrils. He lay on his stomach in the dirt, pinned down. Blood crawled, hot and sticky, down his right cheek.
His vision was beginning to clear, though it was still blurred. Shapes shifted around him, through a thickening smoke haze. He must have briefly lost consciousness as the battlefront had passed over him. Death Korpsmen surrounded him, encased in flak armour and heavy greatcoats. Their boots pulverised the debris beside his head.
How inhuman they looked, he thought, with their faces concealed behind re-breather masks so that even their eyes were hidden. From this lowly vantage-point, he couldn’t tell one from another.
They must have seen him, in turn, but no one came to help him. Why would they? He was nothing but a stranger to them too – and each Korpsman was looking for a clear shot at the enemy, through the crush of his comrades before him, following an imperative drilled into him from birth. Pushing forward, ever forward.
Then, minutes, hours or days had passed, and they were gone.
Arvo barely remembered dragging himself to his feet, throwing off the hunks of masonry that had piled up on his back. He found himself, for the very first time in his life, alone. He had clung to his lasgun throughout his ordeal, so hard the fingers of his right hand had seized up around its trigger guard.
His mask had been knocked askew. The re-breather unit on his chest was dented and inoperative. He shucked off his coat and discarded his broken equipment. The air was unpleasant, but at least it wasn’t toxic, not like the air of his birth world. Not like Krieg.
The man who would be known as Arvo held his mask in his gloved hands. He stared at the reflection of a face he didn’t recognise in its blank, skull-eye sockets and an unfamiliar thought, an unworthy thought, occurred to him.
He was free.