Editing The ship moves (section)

==Part 1==
Junction 344-68B was my home. I mean, it wasn't much of home, but still.

It was perched on the edge of corridor 65, built into the bulkhead, 3 miles of city climbing up the ironcliff like a vine climbing an orchard wall. My family lived at the bottom, in the shanty habs that bordered the corridor proper, in tumbledown fibreboard houses half buried in the encroaching Flakesands. We scratched a living servicing the Smeltships when they came back from mining the Rust Dunes, or thieving from the uphivers when they came down all covered in rust cowls to collect their goods from the trawlcaptains.

I used to hear stories from the traders about other places, places where the Plasma lights didn't work and the environmental systems were so cold, people had to live over vents to the engine cores to stop themselves freezing. Places where you couldn't even see the ceiling and where it rained water instead of oil and forgeash. Some even said there was places where you could see outside the ship. Look out of the inky black and see things they called stars.

The preachers told us not to listen to those folks. Said they was crazy. There ain't nothing outside the ship. How could there be.

Then the Guard came calling and I learnt better.

They were looking for fighting men and Emperor bless me, I volunteered. People don't usually come back from a stint in the Guard, but I had a head on my shoulders that yearned for travel, and a brain too young and dumb to realise that was a bad idea, so I signed my cross on the sheet they gave me and got me a uniform in return.

I got travel as well. God-Emperor did I. They took us in airships across the Rust Dunes, gathering men all the way, from habs like Outlet-35, Irongate, Rifttown and a dozen I hadn't even heard of. They said we was mustering for a crusade in Sector-585. That didn't mean much to me but I was damn sure the newly formed 56th RustCrawler Rifles would kick ass when we got there, even if it took us a year to haul our green behinds to the fight.

Which it did.

I spent 5 months on a boat. Do you know what a boat is son? It travels on water if you can imagine such a thing. I travelled on boat the size of a city down a waterpipe the size of hive. I saw things from that boat I can barely describe. Whole hives built out over the water, like mushrooms growing out of a condenser pipe, full of folk with different colour skins. I saw things living in the water that still give the jeebies in my dreams. And sometimes the pipe opened up, flowing through rooms with ceilings so high you couldn't even see 'em. Just a blue you thought you'd float away into. Yeah, scared the shit out me the first time too.

They taught us how to shoot in the ranges, how to get chewed out by the sergeant for not drilling in time, how to polish your boots and chant the Imperial creed. When we mustered out on the field at the end of that boat ride, we weren’t boys any longer. We were the Guard. We were proud. We were stupid.

But nobody ever said you have to be clever to fight.

We met other regiments then. CabinHivers from upship, covered in chains and gang tattoos. Bearded Hyruns who hadn’t even known they was on the ship till the recruiting ships had landed in the middle of their villages. Stiff backed Pretars. Spoilt bastards the lot of them, but I lost three teeth when I said that to their face.

So we mustered out, marched up and down the field, drilled, saluted all so that the bigwigs could inspect us or whatever it is they do. We obviously passed the test because they put us on the Train.

God-Emperor, the Train! Imagine a cathedral tower the size of a city, laid on its side and put on rails. 4km of spiked turrets, gargoyles and guns. An iron sheathed prow like the beak of a rusthawk. One of the ratings told me she’d been a Navy ship once, unimaginably long ago. Before the ship. Before the exodus. The thought awed me. Still does.

They put us in the holds, but we lucked out and got a view anyway. Once the Train had carried gun batteries big to level planets, but they been stripped out millennia ago. Now there was just a gallery where you could look out on the Ship as the train rolled by. When they weren’t drilling you, or shouting at you, or searching your bedclothes for contraband, you could just sit and watch. We saw, cities glimmer in the dark, oceans of oil, and coolant, and water and on top of it all floating towns chasing whatever lived down there. We saw whole agri-spheres covered in crystal glass like a jewelled planets. The glow of Forgehold 34-786 where they cast tanks in moulds the size of houses. We went through gates, and locks and elevators large enough to make a man feel like an ant next to a mountain.

Once we even came to an area of quiet pines and solemn mountains, stretching as far as the eye could see, and in the distance a single spire of black granite. Someone said that’s where the Astartes waited. Where they watched. After that no-one went into the gallery for a while.

It never pays to be too curious about the angels of death.

We spent 6 months on that train. Waiting, watching, wondering where the hell we were going. Then one day we got our answer.

We were going to Ravengate.

My first impressions of Ravengate was that it was big. But big doesn’t do it justice. My father was big. My mother got big when she stopped exercising and kept eating. Big implies some kind of largeness, like you could stand up against it and compare yourself to it. Compare yourself to Ravengate and you’d just be lost. A Gate, city, and fortress all rolled into one, the hive was a hundred miles of steel, and artillery and trainports. It stretched up the bulk head like a iron door studded with a million rivets, each a city, each a weapon. I remember the train pulling into a siding alongside a dozen others just like it. I watched as a million men disembarked beneath the unmoving glare of the titan legions that strode the ground like metal gods. I remember looking up and seeing a hundred more stations just like it crowded round the oval gate like piglets sucking a teat. I saw the might of humanity gathered for a war in the belly of her own creation. God-emperor it felt good.

This was the crusade that they’d talked about. The liberation of Sector-585. The commisars told us it had been taken by the Orks centuries ago. They’d boiled out of the bowels like a wave of filth, vermin infesting the shadows of the blessed Ship. At the time nobody had the resources to do much about it. So the Ravengate had been sealed and held. The Orkish tide stopped. Now they were going to be cleansed. About damn time.

I don’t remember much about the next few days. I remember the tram rides through the gate itself. A few days in a maze of steel, and firepower. The grim set faces of the RavenGaters who’d been fighting the Orks since they were old enough to stand. I remember watching a speech by Lord-General Perrus and not being able to hear a word he said but cheering anyway. The first look of the from the low mound of RavenGate where it protruded from the sector floor at wastes of 585 themselves; a torn and broken ground or rock and iron, dirty with the scars of two hundred years of artillery. Being literally sick with fear in the mess tent, and the Commissar’s surprisingly comforting hand on my shoulder. The rest’s a blur, a whirl of orders and preparations, waiting and nerves. I don’t even remember the order to attack.

I remember the war though. Such a thing’s hard to forget.

Do you know how I killed my first Ork. The Primer says they’re stupid gutter rats, big dumb animals primed for slaughter. Strong but stupid. What they don’t tell you is that they use every ounce of that strength to try and kill you dead, and that they are really really fucking strong. This particular one took half my squad with it. Guardsmen Kanth was the first to die, head blown of by a gun bigger than my torso. It killed Ren with knife made from a tank door. It just head butted Godis but that was enough.

Then I shot it between the eyes and turned its head into fried meat.

If that sounds unduly skilled I should point out I had my eyes closed and was shitting my pants at the time. But it died and I didn’t, and like anything, once you’ve done something once it gets easier. It also helps to have a few hundred thousand friends on your side follow your example. And follow they did.

Can you imagine what it’s like to hear a half million artillery guns fire at once. To feel your diaphragm rumble to the sound of an angry god. To hear the scream of a rain of steel and fire so loud it makes your ears bleed. To sing the same song of praise as million other voices and mean every word. To feel a million lasguns heat the air to a furnace so every step is through an oven that blackens your skin and makes your hair smoke. To kill in the name of the Emperor, to watch Sgt. Sando get his Hero of the Imperium medal for gutting their Warboss with its own power klaw, then feel the joy of survival as you watch them break and run. That’ll stay with me all my life.

Of course that was just the start. There was more battles, more killing. I was there when we broke the Kult of speed after three months of running battles on the Kodyi Plains beneath the perpetual twilight of a malfunctioning plasma light. I lost an ear in clearing of Debris Warren Godlin, in the dark tunnels beneath the collapsed hive. I got promoted during a defence of the Imperial Artillery Corp’s Lance batteries in Orkish counteroffensive, where a hundred thousand men died just so they could keep firing in support of an offensive on Ork held positions on the other side of the sphere 6, 000km straight up. I got busted back down again for getting trashed celebrating the news Astartes strike teams had severed the support chains of the Ork fortress of Mork’s Town and sent it and all its inhabitants to a fiery death in the reactor core 300 miles below.

And I remember my surprise when a kid, green out of boot, called me a vet for the first time and realising it was true.

But most of all I remember the end. Two years after marching through that gate, we stood at the edge of Sector-585. The histories will talk of the Astartes facing down the Warboss Mragga Thzrat and the liberation of Esme City. They’ll talk of the burning of the Rok-yards in Docking Bay-743Theta. They won’t recall the patrol of the remnants of the glorious 56th. How we chased a bunch of fleeing boyz for three hours in the darkened rat maze of corridors beneath 743Theta. But I will. I remember every ork I shot, every shadow I jumped at. I remember because that chase, it led me there.

The preachers say there’s nothing more than the ship. But they’re wrong.

In that place we found a window, somehow intact and whole, ancient beyond measure, the thin pane of glass all that separated us from the nothing outside. For the first and only time in my life, I saw the stars, saw the stars stare right back at me. They’re beautiful you know. Each a diamond fit for a queen. But there also cold and cruel and jealous. Jealous of the Ship, of the Emperor’s light and of the glory of man. We walked in their light once. Now we walk in our own, and for that they hate us.

Let them hate. We need them no longer. In this Ship we have found a future. In this vessel we shall sail the void until long after the stars have grown cold and dark. We shall endure the endless night and rise anew. This is the Emperor’s plan, the Imperium’s course. It is the fate and duty of humanity to endure against a universe that wishes otherwise.

In the end there is just the Ship, our home, our salvation...

The Ship Is All.

The Ship Moves.