Exterminatus

by Imperaxum

II - Downward

They walked on for hours, through a mess of rubble that towered around them. Bodies were scattered in the debris, humans in uniforms and armor, smashed weapons - but mostly the bodies were of wretches clad in rags clutching metal. Barley could see Thess in every one of those corpses, diseased and leering as they lay broken over rubble, torn open. It was utterly desolate, no living humans or otherwise to be seen. Barley sometimes thought she heard voices, but she didn't trust anything in the air of this city, and the voices never approached the pair.

Thess took the time to spit at every one of the uniformed dead, and when the human looked up, her face was increasingly twisted with joy.

"So. Thess. How's life here?" Barley broke the silence, scrambling over what looked to be once a great machine.

"Life?" Thess slurred by way of reply, and Barley's heart jumped at the thought of the human forgetting everything of their past conversation. Such a situation would probably be followed by another murder attempt, weapons or not. Thess stopped halfway up the face of the machine, clutching at the mess of pipes.

"Life," Thess repeated, her voice clearer, sounding almost haunted by the word. Barley relaxed, so close was she to reaching for the human's knife, buried in her saddlebag. "Life, life, life, life. Sounds weird when you say it a lot." Thess had an unrivaled ability to end a meaningful moment, Barley thought.

"Life before this was nothing. I can't remember much." Thess said quietly, then grabbed a pipe and started hauling herself up again.

"Family?" Barley asked between her awkward efforts to follow the human. Humans were much better at climbing their stupidly complicated creations.

Thess squinted, staring into the metal grating. "Father died when I was eleven. Factory accident, I think. Mother died when I was sixteen, last year of her life was in a bed, coughing. She worked in the underhive, maintenance- air's real bad down there, kills you slowly." Thess paused to cough and retch, then laughed a little. "You know, the coughing she died from was much lesser than the coughing I've got now. Sounds about the same, though."

"Maybe there's something keeping you alive?" Barley muttered, half to herself.

Thess looked down at her hand that had held the knife, cracked, skin peeling and pustules erupting out of every flat space. "I'd hate to see what's inside, yeah."

"You sound better." Barley said idly, searching around for a better way up. The machine was more wide than tall, so they had went up and over; it was a maze of piping and belts and metal grating, hardened metal slag down below from where it had fallen off the belts. The whole thing clearly ran from one great edifice to another, but had fallen over; it was clearest view of the buildings that towered above them that Barley had gotten, and they were just distant shapes in the distant haze. She spotted a series of metal stairs jutting out of the machine's face, and she made for them.

"Yeah." Thess responded as Barley hauled herself onto the stairs. The going was much easier now, simply testing every step before climbing up them. Thess was twenty hooves away, unmindful of Barley's relative ease of ascent.

"So, family," Barley said again.

"I told you about father and mother. No siblings. I'm not leading you to some kind of reunion, pony."

"You're not leading me, we're not going anywhere," Barley scoffed, then darkened. "And all you can remember about your father and mother is how long they lived and how they died. Obsessed with death."

"I disagree, I said what age I was when they died. I don't remember how old they actually were."

"Well-" Barley sputtered, "that's not better at all! What about the pon- excuse me, people? Yes, people. The people they were. How they were. They were your only family, and you can't remember a damn thing about them! Excuse my tone."

Thess burst into laughter, pulling herself against the piping to steady herself as she closed her eyes and grinned at Barley's words. "Tone? Excuse the tone?" she choked out between laughing and coughing.

"That's - dammit, it's habit," Barley cringed.

"That habit's gonna die, pony," Thess commented, and continued her climb. "I mean, or you could die first. Either one."

Barley fell silent. She'd actually swore at the human, coming off the high of the fight - but now that they were talking and resembling sane creatures, she was back to her old Equestrian habits. Barley held no illusions to how well those Equestrian habits would fare in this city. She rather wondered as to how other ponies from the Portal Project had fared in situations like hers- how had they been changed? How badly? How badly could she be changed before she died?

"That doesn't get rid of my point, though. If it wasn't you, I'd label anyone who couldn't remember the parents that sired them as Stars-damned selfish."

"You're a damned soft one, pony. I don't remember them because no one does. I never knew their age. Hell, I don't know how they met. Mother was kind, I don't remember father at all. There's nothing to remember- what, they came back from the work every night, until I was going off to work at ten?"

"Twelve?" Barley said, shocked. "How was the work?"

"I was small then, fit inside the machinery and administered the rites of passage when they got gunked up, Usually just poked it with a rod from a place I thought I wouldn't get crushed if the gears and belts and presses started up again." Thess chuckled, but her voice was hollow. "Looks like, I never guessed wrong."

"That's terrible," Barley said simply, and was quiet for a minute. "When I was twelve, I was feeding the livestock every morning, then going off to school."

"When I turned fourteen - well, when I was too big to get into the machinery well and I couldn't hide around in the ducts to pretend that I could-"

"Why would you want to make them think you could run around in there?" Barley cut the human off, gesturing into the dark bowels of the machine they had almost climbed over.

"Could see it in the eyes of the older workers that watched me clamber in there. I remember that damn well. I had the same look a year later - laugh all you want pony, couldn't ever imagine you laughing at someone else - I had the same look of envy. You know what I was supposed to do for the rest of my life? Line up two components to get five screws put into them by five workers down the line, and then they got stamped together by a press. That's it. Same damned task, fifteen hours a day, six days a week. Seventh day is the Emperor's Day of Contemplation, half a day's work and half a day's prayer. Same goddamned task. I'd be lucky to be alive at thirty." Thess ended her tirade, having stopped her ascent just short of the crest of the machine.

Barley was silent, torn inside. Part of her increasingly saw Thess as a living, thinking creature - a unique soul that was to be valued by every tradition Barley had grown up in. Another part of her now realized of how little value Thess was, how infinitely replaceable she was to this city and to this world. It made the perception of Thess as valuable that much scarier, disease and madness aside. And Barley had always thought of herself as unimportant - always imagined she'd live a simple life, aspired to nothing more than to perhaps be fondly remembered by her ancestors. Thess couldn't even hope for the latter, it seemed.

"I'm nothing, pony. Forget about it." Thess said.

"No," Barley shook her head, "I won't forget you. Count on that."

"That's sweet, pony, but we're just gonna die and then there's no one that cares." Thess said flatly, pulling herself over the crest of the machine, peering over into the rest of the plaza.

"You can say that about anything, but I care, Thess. It's in the nature of ponies. Only thing that matters is the personal bits - get what I'm saying?" Barley stopped at the top, sighed. "I care, Thess. Does that mean anything at all to you?"

"Look, there's a wretch down there." Thess said, voice distant; she had climbed over the crest. Barley scrambled up and over. Below them a human in rags stumbled along, clutching a bit of metal.

"What's with him?" Barley asked.

"Eh, just a straggler. I'm sure we'll meet a proper band farther down: I was with one, till that whole ruckus that spat you out," Thess pointed at Barley, and turned around and looked up, into the haze. "We were headed for the spires, I think, killing us some scrag-headed nobles."

"I'm glad we're headed down and away, then," Barley said.

"Fun's already started, probably long done," Thess said dismissively, waving an arm in the direction of the spires - Barley squinted, and soon discerned flames roiling in the haze, dark shapes towering into points, shimmering from what could only be fires. "Anyway," Thess continued, "let's see what this one's about. H'elay!"

Barley jumped at Thess's yell, grabbed at the machine and pulled herself closer. "Greeting." Thess added, by way of explanation. "Back in Manufactorum Four-Two."

The wretch below heard them, snapping his head upwards to their perch, but showed no sign of recognition of the greeting. Instead, he shook his crude weapon, screamed, "I'll rip out your scragging guts! Dance 'em all pretty over this blade!"

Barley gasped. "Oh, goodness."

"Hurt your ears, pony?" Thess looked over to her companion and smiled.

"Didn't know you mad-humans, didn't know you could even shout something understandable like that. I mean, the chanting and the screams," Barley shuddered, "but that's..."

"Well, let's stick the bastard." Thess said, jumping off the crest and down the slope. "Come on, pony, let's get on with it."

Barley opened her mouth to protest, but she remembered where she was and the outraged words died away. "Just like that?" she asked, following Barley as they made their way downwards. The slightest bit of self-reflection in Barley was horrified at how little thought she put into this - ending a life!

"Yeah. I'm not gonna walk around this scrag-head," Thess said, then stopped halfway down the slope. The wretch down below was screaming all the while, trying to scramble up the face of the machine, but he kept slipping and falling. His arms were worse than Thess's, bare and falling apart, the visible bone the cleanest part of them.

"Can I have my knife?" Thess asked, looking over to Barley with an earnest look. "Come on, I could have just pushed you off the top of this thing. What, am I gonna kill you over that idiot?"

"Does this make me an accessory to murder?" Barley muttered, shook her head. "No, by the way."

"Oh, come on," Thess crossed her arms. "You're going to make me strangle that bastard to death while he's got a blade?"

"I'm not making you fight," Barley tilted her head to the side, "and we can go around."

"You're a scragging servitor, pony, you know that? A servitor." Thess shuddered at the word. "Some kind of servitor that looks out for people's lives just as dumbly as the ones that walk over furnaces to twist a handle on a release valve. That was a terrible - what was it?"

"Metaphor."

"Me-ta-phor. " Thess recited. "Thanks."

"You're being dramatic, this is the first time I've put a protest to your bloodthirstiness. This is ridiculous."

"This is ridiculous." Thess agreed. "You act like his life means something. We end it and keep moving. You want to die up on this platform, arguing. Stupid death, even for me."

"Ponies care about life, Thess," Barley said, shaking her head, "

"Lemme explain it, pony." Thess growled, stepping towards Barley. "His life doesn't mean scrag. My life doesn't mean scrag. No one you'll find down here means anything, and you're an idiot for thinking anything else. Let me kill this bastard, and we can keep on going. Got it?"

Barley saw the hardness in Thess's eyes, bloodlust and anger glaring down on the pony. Barley did not want to fight Thess, not like this, and not over this. "If none of it matters, then," Barley trailed off, passing the knife to Thess. "Damn you." she whispered, but the human didn't notice, or didn't care.

Barley sighed in relief when Thess shifted her gaze downwards to the screaming wretch, then cringed as Thess jumped down, walking up to the wretch. There was no finesse to it - Thess was a killer, but she wasn't a skilled one. The wretch made to lunge at Thess, but she was quicker, jabbing the knife into his stomach, pulling him close. The wretch barely flinched as Thess stabbed him again and again, the two locked together, till Thess reached up and pulled her knife over the wretch's throat, pushing him away.

Barley looked away and gagged. She could stand the murder of ponies around her when her life was in danger; she could stand dead bodies. Somehow, she couldn't bring herself to watch a human she'd had a normal conversation kill someone. A few seconds passed till Barley could look over the edge again. Thess stood over the corpse of the wretch, going through its pockets with one hand while the other was gripping the growing stain of red on her rags.

Barley made her way down. "You're hurt," she said quietly, running up to the human.

Thess was breathing heavily. "Bastard got his knife in me." she gasped.

"Goodness, he did. That wasn't long. You're alive. I'm glad you're alive, Thess." Barley said in a rush, stumbling over her words, a surge of emotion making her shudder.

"Yeah, I got him," Thess regarded the pony oddly. "Coulda used your help."

"Yes, of course," Barley muttered, drawing up alongside Thess, softly touching her bloodied hand. "How bad is it?"

"It's not bleeding. Went deep, but it's not bleeding. Just hurts," Thess grimaced. "I don't think it's bleeding, at least." She took her hand off of the wound in her side, revealing a mess of torn flesh and yellowish ochre, clumps of a chalky substance clotting up her wound. Blood oozed thickly out of it, turning black as it touched the air.

"That's not normal." Barley shuddered.

"It's convenient, though," Thess said. "I don't think I even have to bandage it up. Hurts like hell," she held up her arm, diseased and cracked, "but what doesn't? I'll be fine. You're bleeding."

Barley blinked. "Where?"

"Cut I made a while back," Thess giggled, "It opened up again. Your face is covered in blood."

Barley felt her cheek with a hoof, remembering how Thess had slashed her in an alley far above. Her hoof came back bloodied, and Barley was horrified at how little she felt; no blood, only the faintest ache in her cheek after straining for any sort of feeling. "Looks a hell of a lot nicer than that ugly yellow skin you've got there," Thess continued.

"It's a mane, my mane is the color of barley," Barley said absently, again touching her cheek and swirling around the blood. "How bad is it? It feels like a lot of blood."

"Oh, it's a lot," Thess nodded, "I know scrag about how much blood a pony's got in 'em, but you're still bleeding. Here," Thess reached over and ripped off a length of the rags on the corpse of the wretch, carefully lifting it up to Barley's cheek and wrapping it around the pony's head. She fiddled with the ends for a minute, failing with her knot, before shuffling over in front of Barley kneeling down to her height.

She looked Barley in the eyes and smiled, and Barley forgot the stinging pain in her cheek when she saw the warmth in Thess's eyes. Humans had little beady eyes, and Barley had seen little more than them narrowed in hatred in this city until this moment. Thess brought a hand forward and ran it over Barley's uninjured cheek, her touch softer than Barley could have imagined Thess being capable of. Barley shivered, Tess shifted her gaze back to the makeshift bandage, and the moment passed.

"That'll do, for now. You ought to get whatever's inside me, makes it a lot easier." Thess said, standing up.

Barley shivered again, but there was no warmth anymore. "I'd really rather not. Plain old red blood is fine with me."

"Let's keep going, then," Thess said, turning towards the exit of the plaza. "Down and down. This is pretty exciting."

"Didn't make it very far back in factory life, right?" Barley asked, reaching down and grabbing the dead wretch's knife in her teeth. It tasted like rust, and with a start, Barley realized it also tasted like blood. Thess's blood.

"Got that right," Thess walked off, stopping a dozen paces later to glance behind her. "Barley?"

Thess saw the knife go into Barley's saddlebag. "That's my girl," she grinned.

Barley bristled at that, but it was rapidly becoming a strangely welcome constant in the city. There was a fine line between annoyance and affection, and both were feelings that Barley was starving for.

---

Beyond the plaza was more ruined alleys, till they came across a huge chasm whose depths held an impenetrable haze like the sky, the dull glow of fires burning below. They were walking down a catwalk at an incline beside an enormous factory that jutted out into the empty space, to their perspective a wall them that soared hundreds of meters above their heads, the smokestacks disappearing into the darkness.
It was an hour later when Barley noticed that night was leering over the city. The haze above had darkened, the shadows were growing softer and blending into the ground.

"Hell of a view," Thess commented, breaking the silence between them that had existed since they gotten on the catwalk. The thunder of industry and the staccato of what could only be battle still echoed from below them.

Barley didn't respond, didn't see much to be happy about out on a strip of metal that groaned and creaked while keeping them from falling into the chasm. The cliff of spires and windows and charred craters was fading into the haze and darkness, leaving them alone on the catwalk with a void on every side save that of the blank, featureless factory wall. The scale of it all terrified Barley, knowing that the city still stretched out beneath them and behind them. The factory wall was smooth, the catwalk rusted, or perhaps bloodied. Rust and blood were the same to Barley, decay and death. The city was getting to her, she realized. Surely she would have thought that blood was life, back in Equestria.

"There's someone up ahead," Thess said, cutting into Barley's thoughts. "Hear it?"

Barley stopped and strained to listen. There was a voice, low, speaking incomprehensibly in front of them. Metal, clattering and scraping over metal. Barley wondered if they could turn back, but Thess wordlessly ran ahead and Barley followed.

A form appeared in the haze, one of the armored humans that Thess despised and whose corpses she spat upon. The human was soaked in blood, leaning over the railing, vomiting into the blackness. It retched and mumbled and even Thess had stopped, staring on. Its shoulder armor had the letters 'PDF' etched into it, the two-headed eagle motif clearly visible on its helmet.

The human looked up to them, and Thess tensed. She almost looked afraid of the human in front of them, the symbols of authority still proudly unsullied.

The armored human looked straight at Barley. "What are you doing here?" it rasped. "Why are you damning yourself here?"

It did not even seem to notice Thess, its beady little eyes wide and straining in fear. Barley's stomach churned at the words, glanced over to Thess for her only reassurance in this city. Thess was fixated on the little two-headed eagle, her obvious fear disappearing, her eyes narrowing with hatred.

"Let's burn this bastard," Thess growled, stepping forward, raising her knife. The armored human reached to his belt, pulled free a knife of his own, the fear leaving his eyes, replaced by the same bloodthirsty madness that Barley so often saw in Thess. Behind the evil, Barley's untrained eyes recognized the ease in the armored human's stance, the practiced way that he gripped his knife. She opened her mouth to warn Thess, to tell her that she was might be outmatched.

Thess jumped forward, but the other human took the knife's edge to his armored chest and struck her down with a brutally strong blow, delivered with the gauntlet on his forearm. Barley blinked, rooted in place by the swiftness of it. Thess scrambled backwards, grasping for the railing, trying to pull herself up. The armored human stepped forward, drove his knife into Thess's stomach, flecks of black and blood spraying out. He gripped her shoulder and threw her against the factory wall, raising his knife again when Barley slammed into him.

They struggled, locked together, but there was a desperate rage in Barley and she had the advantage of being on top. His face and her hoof turned red, Barley pinning him down as she scrambled for leverage to throw more weight into her blows. Teeth leered out of the bloodied mess of his face, biting into her hoof, skin ripping as she pulled it back. Something clattered to her left, she glanced over to see the human trying to grip his fallen knife. She struck at his outstretched arm with the strength of sudden fear, heard a crack and saw the arm flail, folding halfway down the forearm.

Still, he was reaching for the knife with his broken arm, raging up against Barley's weight. The scared man was gone, an animal in his place. Barley was glad beyond words when she noticed Thess crawling up, clutching a knife in one hand and trying to stem the flow of blood and ochre from her stomach with the other.

"End it," Barley snarled, holding the armored human down with all her strength. She was distantly surprised when Thess did not immediately thrust her knife into the other human's neck.

Instead, she felt something brushing against her mouth, the knife - the handle of the knife being shoved into her mouth. Straining against the armored human with all her might, Barley risked a moment to glance over to Thess, trying to gather enough air in her lungs to yell at her companion to finish off the squirming animal beneath her.

There was a heart-breaking evil in Thess's eyes, a malignant grin twisting her face as she forced the handle of the knife into the grip of Barley's mouth. Trading glances with Thess in that moment was glimpsing utter madness, Barley unwillingly biting down on the handle so the knife was not forced into her throat. Shaking hands grasped Barley's head, trying to push it down. Her body was spent, every muscle burning, her mind screaming for her to end it.

She stabbed the armored human in the face, the knife making a sucking noise as it slid into the red mess. Hot tears stung the wound in her cheek as she brought her head up and down, teeth jarring as the knife scraped against his skull, until something cracked. The armored human spasmed, then was still, dead without a word. Barley thought that he had deserved a final sentence or two. It looked like he had had a story to tell. She had scrambled back from the corpse, lying against the factory wall, tears streaming down her face. She had ended that story.

Barley looked to Thess, sitting on the ground. The human did not meet her gaze, clutching at the red stain on her stomach.

"Thess," Barley said evenly.

Thess glanced up, blinking, the madness gone from her eyes, replaced by a pained look. The human's features were twisted with emotion, and Barley felt her own surging anger fade away into nothing. She was surprised at how little hatred her voice held. Barley thought that she should be utterly outraged, but she only felt hollow.

They lay there in the cool stillness for a while, till Barley opened her eyes to find Thess rummaging through the pouches on the corpse's belt. The pony rose to her hooves, hardly feeling her new wounds, and continued down the catwalk. She was dimly aware of Thess following her, but when she looked back, the human did not meet her gaze again, glancing down every time.

"Are you alright?" Barley asked.

"I will live," Thess answered quietly. "I'm afraid the madness makes me very hard to kill."

They continued walking along in the darkness.

"I do not think you will win that fight," Barley said after a while.

"Against that trooper? I shoulda had him. I'll do better next time," Thess said, and Barley supposed that was quite the admission for the human.

Barley shook her head. "I do not think you will overcome that madness," she said. "I do not think my presence will save you."

Thess did not respond, but the next time Barley looked back, the human's hands were balled into fists and there were tears in her eyes as she stared at the grating beneath them. Barley supposed she should reassure her companion to her sanity, but she felt it was appropriate for the human to stew in her self-made misery for a while longer. She was very distantly saddened at her coldness, but she said nothing comforting to the human, nothing at all.

They came to a door in the factory wall, and inside was a cargo lift. They went inside, pulled a lever, and the compartment rumbled downwards at a walking pace. Barley was exhausted, unable to care where it would take them or what they would find at the bottom, and curled up in a corner without a word. She did not break the silence when Thess crawled up, wrapping an arm around the pony, nestling up against her. The human felt frail and weak, distinctly alive in this leering city. Barley found herself absently stroking Thess's coarse hair till she fell asleep, the sounds of the city muffled, listening to the human's shuddering breaths.

Comments

[Anon ymous]

10/10 more.

[Neacroon]

Totally different than everything wh40k I read... Mayby just plain realistic. Great. Story. Again. 10/10

[Solo Wing of The Abyss]

Damn worshippers of Khorne! At least they stay dead when I put a bolt into their heads! They never do know when to just lay down and die! At the very least that PDF trooper gave his life for the Emperor as any good citizen should. May the Emperor protect thee in death Citizen. But yeah this was a good chapter, I like the pacing so far and I'm still hoping for a scene of the Guard kicking heretic ass. Because that'd be awesome.

=][= Imperial Thought of the Day =][=

Blessed are the Gunmakers

[N4rwh41]

7297920 yeah, most 40K syories focus on the fighty aspect, vwry few focus on how iy actually affects people.