Please note that I have now started to re-write this story and it can be found through my profile. I've kept the old version on here for those of you that like to revisit and for general posterity.

Please note that this story is set in the Warhammer 40K universe which is the intellectual property of Games Workshop Ltd."

Memories tumbled around in his head. He remembered the cold. It was impossible not to remember the cold of the Orrax ice mines. He remembered the hatred that kept him warm at night. They had tried to take him down several times, but without their leader they were like a sump-rat without a head. They weren't so formidable, by then, as the reputations they had built around themselves back in the day. He'd been able to stave them off one at a time. But even this knowledge hadn't taken the edge off of his fear. It had stayed keen even as he tasted sweet victory time and again.

He remembered Orrax like he was still there, but for the life of him he couldn't remember what he'd been so afraid of.

The wind howled mournfully through the girders, struts and braces of the gargantuan scaffold that supported the berg-side. At the ice wall, men with vibro-cutters worked away at the frost-rimed surface, hacking out great chunks and loading them onto the clanking conveyors belts that lurched off into the factorum in the sheltered hollow below the berg.

The noise was phenomenal, a screaming that rivalled even the gale-force wind for pitch and volume. The wall-workers, well wrapped up against the sub-zero temperatures in thermo-lined gear, were also equipped with glare goggle, re-breathers and filter plugs to protect their ears. There was little bare skin on show, such a blatant disregard for heat discipline in these conditions would see a man suffering from hypothermia before the day was out, or missing a few blackened fingers - and that could be just as fatal.

Inside the factorum, hundreds more frost-bitten slaves were lifting the blocks from the belts with thermo-lined gloves, dumping them irreverently into the metal bins on their crazed, squealing wheel-treads. Yet more thick-wrapped bodies waited to push the burdened bins up the ramp, two bodies to a dumpster. The workers here were the lucky ones, this was considered light duty in the ice mines, work that women and the more elderly colonists could do, as well as those too feeble to work the berg. The steam from a thousand or more sweating bodies made for an almost comfortable, though humid temperature and many were able to strip down to vests or at least their under-lining. The gloves stayed on, however, else the lifters would leave the skin of their moist palms on any block they touched.

The bins were pushed by main force up a shallow ramp into the bellow of a moon-bound flyer, a sky-tub that had been designed to withstand the high-velocity winds of Orrax while still bearing a heavy payload. They weren't graceful, but they were reliable and on Orrax, reliability was a survival trait.

Inside a Munitorium junior wielded his quota-slate with firm authority, backed up by the team of white-armoured guards with their large-bore shotguns. These faceless men were constantly on guard. Invisible eyes, ever watchful for the least step out of place. Even those selected for interior duties, diminutive and feeble though they might seem, often proved dangerous if caution was not stringently exercised. The stronger colonists, those at the wall, had learned early on to manipulate the weaker ones, often subjecting them to enough mental torture to convince them that it was a really good idea to mob the guards and try and acquire their weapons. Unfortunately, due to the colonists' general propensity towards the shadier aspects of human existence, these endeavours had always ended in tragedy for the colonists themselves, and as in any harsh environment, it was the weak that suffered hardest.

With the bins secured in the hold, the pushers retreated to acquire a fresh, empty vessel and wheel it into place at one of the hundreds of belts. It was a monotonous, grinding existence, but it exhausted them enough to cow them. And it was true that many of them did need to be cowed. Why else would they have ended up in a Penal Colony?

Corgan was considered one of the stronger colonists at Installation 537, and so he worked at the wall. He was grateful for this, because it meant he was unrecognisable in his thermo-gear to all but the most observant. And even they should be too weary to take any notice of the way he wielded his ice-cutter.

Should.

Corgan's gratitude for the seeming-anonymity granted him by his gear was, as it had been twice before, misplaced.

They'd learned to identify him. But at least they hadn't yet learned to disguise their clumsy sneaking approach to his position at the wall. Usually the workers didn't move very far, preferring to work at their allocation of the berg with a focus born of exhaustion. So when he noticed two of his fellow workers sidling steadily towards him it was a fair assumption that they weren't as focused as they should have been.

The supervisors were a bunch of slack-arsed idlers, else they'd have put these men back to work. But then, this wouldn't be the first time they'd been paid off. Colonists didn't have much that they could call their own, but on a world where women were as difficult to come by as a warm spot to sleep, arrangements could still be made. It had worked that way in every y-chromo penitentiary since the idea was invented.

Corgan didn't have much time for that sort of thing, he preferred to take what he wanted. He also preferred to strike pre-emptively. But he waited until they were closing in on him before he made his move.

Even while watching them he'd been carefully sculpting a chunk of ice so that as soon as they came within a few feet of him he was able to strike it with just the right amount of force and in precisely the right spot to shatter the block to a thousand slippery fragments that showered onto the high walkway of his gantry, seven scaffold-stories up.

'Come and get me, you bastards!' he cried, though it was unlikely they could hear him even as they shed their flimsy pretence and charged at him headlong.

One of them slipped on the fragments and over shot as Corgan duck into the hollow he'd created in the berg-side. He slid and fell, cracking his coccids on the grille-work of the walkway. The second managed a steady footing and brought his wicked vibro-saw to bear, Corgan imagined he was snarling, but the sound was lost to the wind.

Besides, what do I care? Was his only thought as his rammed his saw through the man's belly, narrowly avoiding the other man's thrust which missed Corgan's right ear by mere centimetres. Blood seeped from the man's body-suit, it would have gushed but the man had slumped forward, effectively closing the terrible wound. In spasm, the man grabbed Corgan's weapon and staggered back, stepping right off the gantry and falling. The second man was regaining his feet but it was too late, Corgan stepped up behind him and shoved him hard. He teetered for a long moment, arms spinning like wind turbines before he fell out and away, to land on the hard-packed ice seven stories down with his friend.

Corgan turned back to the wall, picking up his attacker's abandoned tool and went back to work.

Just another day, he thought to himself.

Then the yellow hazard light started flashing to tell them all to down-sticks and muster up in the yard below. The wardens would know it was his saw when they pulled it out on the guy and checked the serial number against that morning's equipment manifest.

They might rough him up a bit. They might even put him in the tank for a day or two but they knew that'd be doing him a favour more than anything else – a few days sleep would be bliss. In the end they'd just put him back into circulation and hope that the Catachan mob would do their work a little better. For the wardens, the skivvies of the Adeptus Arbites here on Orrax, there was no other legitimate way of getting rid of the man that had put more of their workforce in hospital than any other. And if they tried the shadier route, well, he'd take more than one of them out with him before the end, that he swore.