Free Void Stalker by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

yet he had very few. Dannicen Meyd wasn’t a man given over to musing over misery. He’d tried to talk Rivall out of the plains life, though. That hadn’t worked out so well. It went almost exactly the same as it’d gone when Dannicen’s own father had tried to say the same words to him, way back in a life before all these aches and pains.
    He was giving in to that often-replayed memory when the city’s sirens started up their discordant wail.
    ‘You’re not serious,’ he said aloud. Storms were starting damn early this year. Last he’d heard from Rivall, they were supposed to have a few weeks yet, maybe even a month.
    Dannicen hauled himself from the couch that served as his bed, sucking air through his teeth as his knees crackled in chorus. Both joints came awake with needling jabs beneath the bone. Nasty, nasty. Getting old is a bitch, make no mistake.
    A shadow passed his window. He looked up just as fists started pounding on the flakboard plank that served as his door.
    ‘Throne of the bloody Emperor,’ he grunted as his knees gave another protest, but he was up and walking no matter what they had to say about it.
    Romu Chayzek was on the other side of the door. Romu Chayzek was also armed. The battered Guard-issue lasrifle hadn’t been new this side of the millennium’s turning, but as Watchman for South-43 Street down to North/South Junction-55, he had the right to bear arms in his patrols.
    ‘Going hunting for dust rabbits?’ he almost laughed, gesturing to the gun. ‘A little early to be shooting looters, kid.’
    ‘The sirens,’ Romu was panting. He’d obviously run here, down the muddy alley that served as a street for the prefabricated bunkerish buildings.
    ‘Storms are early.’ Dannicen leaned out of the door, but any view of the horizon was stolen by Sanctuary’s broken-tooth skyline. Families were pouring from their homes, milling through the street in every direction.
    Romu shook his head. ‘Come on, you deaf old bastard. To the sub-shelters with you.’
    ‘Not a chance.’ The Meyd house had stood up to every Grey Winter so far, as had most of those in this section of the city. South Sector, 20 through 50, had the choicest picks of the troop landers way back at the Day of Downfall. All that armour did the deed when it came to keeping out the worst of the dust storms.
    ‘Listen to me, it ain’t the storms. The archregent’s under attack.’
    For a moment, Dannicen didn’t know whether to laugh or go back to bed. ‘…he’s what?’
    ‘This ain’t a joke. He could be dead already, or… I don’t know what. Come on! Look at the sky, you son of a bitch.’
    Dannicen had seen the panic in Romu’s eyes before, on the faces of those he’d served with outside the walls. That animal fear of being lost on the plains, turned about and directionless as a dust blizzard bore down. Helplessness – sincere, absolute helplessness – painted across a man’s face, turning it sick and ugly.
    He looked to the west, towards the distant archregent’s tower, where a faint orange gleam illuminated the evening sky behind the rows of awkward urban stalagmites serving as a cityscape horizon.
    ‘Who?’ he asked. ‘Who would attack us? Who even knows we’re here? Who even cares?’
    Romu was already running, blending in with the crowd. Dannicen saw him reach a cloth-wrapped hand to help a young boy back to his feet, and shove him into the press of bodies.
    Dannicen Meyd waited another moment, before he took his aching knees and arthritic hands back inside his house. When he emerged, he carried his own lasrifle – and this one worked just fine, thank you very much. He’d used it in his own days as a volunteer Watchman, shooting looters in the Grey Winters after his retirement from storm-scrying.
    He kept to the edge of the crowd, walking west as they pressed east. If the archregent was under attack, to hell with running and hiding. Let it never be said that Dannicen Meyd didn’t know how to do