Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [69]
Tomaz said nothing. He’d worked fifteen hours straight today, on a dock backed up with dozens and dozens of ships, with almost no room to unload. Fifteen hours of shouting, of broken vox-casters and no techs spare to fix them, of cargo being dumped wherever it could be dumped – which was inevitably the wrong place (and the most inconvenient one for someone else) – necessitating its removal minutes later when another worker’s already fouled-up work was fouled-up even further.
Frankly, he didn’t much care if he got shoved over onto the ground. Maybe he could curl up and get some damn sleep.
‘Sir,’ he prompted.
Sarren finally looked up from the hololithic table. The colonel had aged in the last week, Maghernus could see it clearly. He looked as tired and bone-achingly sick of it all as Tomaz felt.
‘What?’ Sarren asked, narrowing his bloodshot eyes. ‘Oh. Yes. Dockmaster.’ Sarren looked back down at the hololithic display. ‘I need your crews to speed up. Is that understood?’
Maghernus blinked. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t quite hear you.’
‘I need,’ Sarren didn’t look up, ‘your crews to speed up their work. The reports I’m getting from the docks show they are at a standstill. We are talking about significant portions of the north and east perimeters of the city, dockmaster. I need to move troops. I need to store materiel. I need you to do your job.’
Maghernus looked around the room in disbelief, unsure how to respond.
‘What would you have me do, colonel? What is there that I can possibly do?’
‘Your job, Maghernus.’
‘Have you even seen the docks recently, colonel?’
Sarren looked up again, laughing without even a shred of humour. ‘Do I look like I have seen anything except casualty reports recently?’
‘I can’t do anything about the docks,’ Maghernus shook his head, a sense of unreality settling over him. ‘I’m not a miracle worker.’
‘I appreciate you have an… intense… workload.’
‘That’s not the half of it. We’re dealing with a backlog of weeks, months even, and no room to handle anything.’
‘Nevertheless, I need more from you and your crews.’
‘Of course, sir. I’ll be back in a moment, I feel the sudden need to piss expensive white wine and turn everything I touch into gold.’
‘This is no laughing matter.’
‘And I’m not laughing, you pompous son of a bitch. “Work harder”? “Do more”? Are you insane? There’s nothing I can do!’
Nearby officers glanced his way. Sarren sighed and rubbed his closed eyes with the tips of his fingers.
‘I respect the difficulties of your position, dockmaster, but this is the first week of the siege. This is only going to get worse. We are all going to sleep much less, and we are all going to work much harder.
‘Furthermore, I understand that you are sweating blood in an underappreciated duty, but you are not the only one suffering. You, at least, are guaranteed to live longer than many of us. I have men and women in the streets, fighting and dying for your home, so that you may continue to complain at how I crack the whip over you. I have hundreds of thousands of citizens under arms, facing the greatest alien invasion force the world has ever seen.
‘Sir,’ Maghernus took a breath. ‘I will–’
‘You will shut up and let me finish, dockmaster. I have platoons of men and women lost behind the advancing enemy line, no doubt hacked to pieces by the axes of barbarous xenos monsters. I have armour divisions running out of fuel because of resupply difficulties in the embattled sectors. I have an Emperor-class Titan on its knees, because its commander was too angry to think clearly. I have a city with its edges on fire, and its population in rout with nowhere to run to. I have tens of thousands of soldiers dying to prevent the enemy from reaching the Hel’s Highway – people dying for a road, dockmaster – because once the beasts reach the city’s spine, we are all going to die a great deal faster.
‘Now, am I making myself perfectly clear when I tell you that while I have sympathy for your difficulties, I also expect you to work through them?