Honourbound - Rachel Harrison
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More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library
STEEL DAEMON
A novella by Ian St. Martin
• THE MINKA LESK SERIES •
By Justin D Hill
Book 1: CADIA STANDS
Book 2: CADIAN HONOUR
SHADOWSWORD
A novel by Guy Haley
BANEBLADE
A novel by Guy Haley
YARRICK
An omnibus edition of the novels Imperial Creed, The Pyres of Armageddon, the novella Chains of Golgotha and several short stories by David Annandale
STRAKEN
An ‘Iron Hand’ Straken novel by Toby Frost
THE MACHARIAN CRUSADE
An omnibus edition of the novels Angels of Fire, Fist of Demetrius and Fall of Macharius by William King
• GAUNT’S GHOSTS •
By Dan Abnett
THE FOUNDING
An omnibus edition containing books 1–3:
First and Only, Ghostmaker and Necropolis
THE SAINT
An omnibus edition containing books 4–7:
Honour Guard, The Guns of Tanith, Straight Silver and Sabbat Martyr
THE LOST
An omnibus edition containing books 8–11:
Traitor General, His Last Command, The Armour of Contempt and Only in Death
Book 12: BLOOD PACT
Book 13: SALVATION’S REACH
Book 14: THE WARMASTER
Book 15: ANARCH
• THE ELYSIANS •
Audio dramas by Chris Dows
Part 1: SCIONS OF ELYSIA
Part 2: RENEGADES OF ELYSIA
Part 3: MARTYRS OF ELYSIA
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
The Bale Stars Crusade
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Anarch’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.
Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
‘Loyalty, before the threat of death.’
– old Antari saying
The Bale Stars Crusade
HIGH COMMAND
Lord-General Militant Alar Serek
Lord-Marshal Veris Drake
Fleet Commander Gulieta Vallah
High-King Araxis of House Stormfall
Lord-Castellan Caradris
General-Primary Hu-Sul
COMMISSARIAT
Lord-Commissar Mardan Tula
Cadet-Commissar Pollivar Curtz
Commissar Lukas Vander, assigned to the Kavrone Dragoons
Commissar Severina Raine, assigned to the Eleventh Antari Rifles
Eleventh ANTARI RIFLES
Command Echelon
General Juna Keene
Grey Company
Command Squad
Captain Yuri Hale
Nuria Lye, medic
Makar Kayd, vox-operator
Ari Rath, standard bearer
Lydia Zane, primaris psyker
‘Wyldfolk’ Infantry Squad
Sergeant Daven Wyck
Yulia Crys
Gereth Awd
Karo Efri
Dal
Vyne
Tian
Kane
Jey
Haro
‘Duskhounds’ Storm Trooper Squad
Captain Andren Fel
Cassia Tyl
Oran Jeth
Afi Myre
Caiden Rol
Blue Company
Captain Sale Devri
Gold Company
Captain Karin Sun
Pharo, primaris psyker
Fyregiants armoured detachment
Lieutenant Frayn, tank commander, Demolisher tank Stoneking
Ely Kolat, gunner, Demolisher tank Stoneking
Curi, loader, Demolisher tank Stoneking
Vurn, driver, Demolisher tank Stoneking
Support
Requisitions Adept Lori Ghael, of the Departmento Munitorum
KAVRONE DRAGOONS
Command Echelon
General Kaspar Sylar
THE SIGHTED
Calvar Larat, traitor witch
Cretia Ommatid, Sixth of Nine, ‘She Who Watches’
Ahxon-Pho, Fifth of Nine, ‘That Which Creates’
Prologue
Jona Veer is a dead man, covered in blood.
He runs as fast as his legs will carry him. They are burning nearly as bad as his lungs are from the smoke. The forge complex is thick with it, like fog blown in off the water. It wreathes massive machines that line the aisles, and curls up towards a vaulted ceiling. His boots ring off rust-stained decking as he lurches over thick loops of cabling and splashes through the filthy water sluicing from vast industrial laser cutters and plasma burners that make up the tank assembly line. Panel beaters stutter on repeat, and lifters whine and gasp as they raise and lower sheets of steel. All of that machinery sends ash into the air. It blizzards around Veer, getting in his eyes and making them itch and sting. Everything smells like burning and death. Tastes like it too.
Or maybe that’s just from when Chiya’s blood got in his mouth.
He retches
so hard it makes him stagger, but nothing will come up except thick ropes of bile. Her face had opened up like a wyldblossom, red and blooming as she shouted at him.
Shoot, you damned fool! Shoot!
Veer hears them behind him. The Sighted. They are laughing and clattering their weapons off the hulls of tanks. Those wicked knives that he saw gut Soli and Fren. They had opened them up slow, laughing all the while, then they’d used the blood to paint things on their skin. Things that made him sick while he hid, still not able to shoot.
Clatter. Clatter.
Clatter.
It comes from everywhere, and it sounds so close. Throne, how he doesn’t want that death. That slow spill of his guts or a bullet to the head. But then, Veer doesn’t want any death at all. Not an honourable one either, like the others. He wants to live. Veer starts running again and he tastes something else now too, mixing with the ashes and with Chiya’s blood.
It’s salt, from the tears tracking through the dirt on his face.
‘Come back, soldier,’ the Sighted shout from behind him. ‘We are not finished with you yet.’
Their voices come in the gaps between the thrumming machine noise as the manufactorum keeps working, oblivious to the war at its heart. Servitors trundle back and forth on heavy tracks, paying no heed to Veer as he runs. Half-finished chassis of tanks judder along the line to have their armour machined in place. God-killers, built to fell Titans. Veer isn’t a god-killer. He’s not a killer of any kind. He couldn’t even shoot. Not to save Chiya, or even Soli and his damned awful singing.
He’s nearly at the end of the line. The chassis of the last Stormlord to roll off the ash-clogged assembly-way waits like a great dark creature in the smoke, terrifying and immobile, complete save for the lighting of its reactor heart. He could hide under it, if he could just get to it.
But Veer doesn’t get close. With his eyes full of smoke and sweat and blood that isn’t his, he runs right into a shadowy figure that sends him crashing to the ground. The impact of it doesn’t hurt him really, but it gets him crying all the worse.
The Sighted he ran into squats on his heels in front of him and cocks his head. His eyes are without irises, just black from centre to edge, and cruel, though the smile beneath them is much crueller. Small silver mirrors and multicoloured tattered feathers hang on a loop of cord around the Sighted’s neck. His fatigues are blue and grey under the bloodstains, and his combat vest hangs open to show all of the carvings in his pale skin. This close, Veer realises they are dates. Times. All scored in spirals. There are new ones painted over the top in blood.
‘There we are, little soldier,’ the Sighted says, in his strange accent.
The Sighted pulls his knife as the others come up behind Veer. He can hear them all laughing, his lasgun cold in his hands. He could shoot. He should shoot. His fingers twitch by the trigger.
‘Oh,’ the Sighted says, with a black-toothed smile. ‘Will you shoot me, Antari? It seems so late to try. Too late for all of your comrades.’
Chiya’s voice echoes in Veer’s head.
Shoot, you damned fool! Shoot!
But Veer doesn’t shoot this time either. His lungs ache and his limbs burn. When he blinks, his eyelids stick from the blood on his face. Veer lets out a shaking, slow breath.
And drops his rifle on the ground.
‘I yield,’ he rasps. ‘Just spare me, please.’
The Sighted laughs so loud that it carries even over the machine noise. His brothers and sisters join in, like a flock of crows cawing.
‘And what use would you be to me? A soldier who will not even shoot.’ The Sighted pauses, then sighs. ‘But your blood. That is another matter.’
He raises the knife, and Veer squeezes his eyes shut. Holds his breath.
But the strike never lands; instead there’s a series of loud, flat bangs and the whip-crack of las-fire. Blood hits his face for the second time, only this time it’s cold and it smells as though it were spilt a week ago. Veer collapses forwards, retching again. A figure moves to stand above him. He sees the toes of black, mud-spattered boots, and Veer’s blood goes cold too. He knows who it is before he looks up. Severina Raine.
The commissar.
‘On your feet, Jona Veer.’
He finds that he can’t say her name, her rank. He can’t say much of anything. When he stands, his legs nearly go from under him. Commissar Raine is a shadow in a shadowed place, all dressed in black with the gilt edges of her uniform dulled by ashes and dirt. Her black greatcoat snaps as it catches in the hot air of the forge. Her silver chest-plate is scored and dented from impacts and knife edges, because the commissar never runs.
Not like he did.
Veer finally looks her in the face. Raine’s tawny skin is scarred, and her dark eyes are as cold and still as deep water. Behind Raine there are others wearing Veer’s colours. Splintered green and grey. He sees Sergeant Wyck with his squad behind him, and Captain Hale too. There’s no movement in Hale’s scarred face, not even a blink. Wyck says something that he can’t hear and shakes his head, just a little.
Veer thinks he’s saying stupid.
Raine’s eyes flicker down to where Veer’s rifle lies in the ashes and dust.
‘Your powercell is full,’ she says. ‘You haven’t fired a shot.’
Veer can’t lie now, just as he couldn’t shoot before. It’s an impossibility.
‘No,’ he says.
‘You ran,’ she says. ‘In the face of the enemy, you failed to fire your rifle, and then you ran.’
Veer thinks about it. About Chiya’s face and all that blood and the way that Fren tried to grab hold of him and snap him out of it.
About how he pushed Fren to the ground so that the Sighted would get him first.
‘Yes,’ he says, his voice a rasp.
Raine’s eyes don’t change. There’s no malice in them, just that same deep cold. She raises the ornate black and crimson pistol she carries and points it at his face.
‘Jona Veer,’ she says. ‘I find you in dereliction of your duty to the Eleventh Antari Rifles, to the Bale Stars Crusade, and to our Holy Lord on Terra. The punishment is death.’
A tear slides down Veer’s face again, and he wishes it wouldn’t. Not in front of his own.
‘Do you have anything to say in your defence?’ Raine asks.
Veer listens to the thunder of the machines around him. Motes of ash drift past his face. He is shaking from head to toe, like being caught out in the cold.
‘I just wanted to live,’ he says, his voice cracking.
Raine lets out a slow breath. Veer hears the creak of her gloves as she moves her fingers.
‘Then you should have stayed to fight,’ she says.
And the maw of the pistol lights up.
One
Fire and thunder
Commissar Severina Raine slides a fresh magazine into her bolt pistol with a hard click. She has replaced the eight-round magazine four times. Thirty-two shots fired.
Six of them to execute her own troops.
Raine has fought many wars on many fronts across the Bale Stars, and almost all of them have been against the Sighted, or their splinter cults. She has seen the way they turn worlds with whispers and false promises. The way they set workers against their masters, and guards against those that they are meant to protect. It’s what makes them dangerous. When you battle the Sighted, you battle the people of the Bale Stars too. Scribes and soldiers. Priests and peacekeepers. The poor, the downtrodden, the ambitious and the reckless. For some of those that serve with her, that knowledge is too much. For some it is just fear that means they find the trigger impossible to pull. No matter the reason, they will find themselves looking down the barrel of her pistol, Penance, in turn. Just like Penance, Raine is made for the act of judgement. For the instant before the strike of the hammer and the burst o
f flame. She understands what it means to pull the trigger, and what it makes her. She is not driven by anger, or malice. That would undermine her purpose, which is the same no matter the crime.
To eliminate weakness.
Raine crouches down and takes Jona Veer’s ident-tags from around his neck. They will not be sent back to Antar as with the honoured dead. They will be disposed of at the end of the fight on Laxus Secundus. His name will go with them, to be forgotten in time by everyone but her, because Raine never forgets the dead, honoured or not.
‘Commissar.’
The voice belongs to Captain Yuri Hale. It’s rough-edged, like he is. The captain of Grey Company is tall, like most Antari. Three deep, severe scars run down the left side of his face from hairline to chin. The Antari call him lucky because he managed to keep his eye. They say he must have been graced with that luck by a white witch, or by fate itself. Raine doesn’t believe in luck. She believes that Yuri Hale survives the same way the rest of them do.
By fighting for every breath.
‘More power spikes from the inner forge,’ he says.
Raine puts Veer’s tags in her pocket, where they clatter against the others, then she gets to her feet and looks to the dust-caked screen on the auspex kit Hale is holding. When the regiment first entered the forges, more than six hours ago, it was registering soft spikes. Now the peaks are jagged, with the regularity of a great, slow heartbeat.
‘Whatever the Sighted are doing in there, it’s burning hot,’ Hale says, and he frowns. ‘Kayd’s been picking up enemy vox too.’
‘On an open channel?’
‘Aye, it’s as if they don’t care if we hear it.’
‘Anything of use?’ Raine asks.
Hale’s frown deepens, and it pulls at the scars on his face. ‘The words were Laxian. Kayd reckons they said something like “it draws near”.’
Despite the arid heat of the forge, Raine feels a distinct chill at those words. The tactical briefing two days prior had been clear. The primary forge on Laxus Secundus is an invaluable asset, both tactically and logistically, and not just because of the super-heavy tanks built there, but because of what waits in the inner forges. High Command did not disclose the purpose of the machines that Raine and the Antari would find there, only that they must not fall into Sighted hands. That for the enemy to use them successfully would be catastrophic, not just for the battle inside the forges, but for the war effort across Laxus Secundus and the crusade front.