Those who had never seen the sun did not long for the light. The underhive of the hive world Castigar, Ivan’s entire world, was a steel burrow where day never came.
Above his head, pillars rising dozens of kilometres and the cities of the upper levels completely blocked out the sky. Beneath his feet, unidentified wastewater flowed with an unpleasant sound. The air was always thick with the sweet, fishy reek of factory fumes and toxic gases. Every breath brought a thin pain from deep in his lungs, but to the underhive people of Castigar, that was merely the natural proof that they were alive.
Ivan’s father had died when his lungs melted away in the heat of a boiler room, and his mother never returned after the hem of her clothes was caught in the machine gears on the purification tank line. It was nothing special—an ordinary tragedy that happened thousands of times a day on a hive world.
There was only one way to survive there: read the room quickly, avoid the eyes of gangs and overseers coveting your territory, and lie flat like a cockroach. Before he was even ten, Ivan had endured each day in battered maintenance coveralls, wiping oil grime from spare parts.
"Resident number—Castigar-88-99042."
The dry voice of the conscription officer echoed through a dented loudspeaker.
That day, too, was an ordinary ash-grey day. An Imperial conscription order descending upon the entire underhive like a sudden disaster. Whenever the Imperium’s vast machine demanded a mass of flesh to shove into the gears of war, the underhive of a hive world was the first storehouse to be emptied.
The muzzles of lasguns wielded by military police gleamed beyond the iron bars, while the conscription officers branded red barcode tattoos onto the recruits’ left forearms without even asking about their histories. No one called them by name. The names their parents had given them were not entered in the cargo manifests of those immense planetary transports. Only quantities and numbers existed.
"You from the boiler line?"
Inside the transport, in a compartment packed full like cargo, the man seated beside him asked. He was a heavily built man in a mining helmet: Brix. Ivan merely nodded instead of answering. Those raised breathing the same fumes had no need for many words.
Thoom!
The transport’s engines shuddered violently as it tore through the atmosphere. Ivan stared at the tightly sealed steel hatch.
Castigar, the city of fumes he had wanted to escape his entire life. But there was no fool here who thought they were on their way to see the luxurious "sun" they had never once laid eyes on. With nothing more than the instinct for reading danger he had gained living as a hive-world rat, he knew in his bones that the destination of this enormous steel can would be a far more dreadful hell than the home where he had been born.
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