Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al. Read online

  BACKLIST

  After you enjoy the stories in this anthology,

  we recommend the following titles:

  DARK IMPERIUM

  Guy Haley

  LEGACY OF THE WULFEN

  Robbie MacNiven and David Annandale

  AZRAEL

  Gav Thorpe

  THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL

  Guy Haley

  THE TALON OF HORUS

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  CADIA STANDS

  Justin D Hill

  THE HORUSIAN WARS: RESURRECTION

  John French

  SISTERS OF BATTLE: THE OMNIBUS

  James Swallow

  THE EYE OF MEDUSA

  David Guymer

  FARSIGHT: CRISIS OF FAITH

  Phil Kelly

  RISE OF THE YNNARI: GHOST WARRIOR

  Gav Thorpe

  I AM SLAUGHTER

  Dan Abnett

  HORUS RISING

  Dan Abnett

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Crusade – Andy Clark

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  The Lost King – Robbie MacNiven

  Honour of the Third – Gav Thorpe

  The Word of the Silent King – L J Goulding

  Extinction – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Sarcophagus – David Annandale

  The Purity of Ignorance – John French

  Red & Black – James Swallow

  The Zheng Cipher – Josh Reynolds

  A Sanctuary of Wyrms – Peter Fehervari

  Howl of the Banshee – Gav Thorpe

  Culling the Horde – Steve Parker

  The Lightning Tower – Dan Abnett

  About the Authors

  Further Reading

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for buying this book. You stand on the precipice of a

  great adventure – welcome to the worlds of Warhammer 40,000.

  Herein you will find a host of great stories that explore the distant, horrifying future – a blighted universe of mighty heroes, dark

  overlords, vicious aliens, bloodshed and betrayal. Here, great armies clash in brutal conflict as the Imperium of Man defends its borders

  against the rampaging hordes of xenos, the perpetual threat of

  Chaos and the treachery of the enemy within.

  With this book you will undertake a journey through a broken

  future and meet some of the many characters that inhabit it,

  pointing the way to even further adventures – recommending your

  next reads from the extensive and ever-expanding Black Library

  range.

  So charge up your lasgun or ready your warp staff and let us begin.

  You have but to turn the page…

  CRUSADE

  ANDY CLARK

  CHAPTER ONE

  The augur probe Kalides-Gamma-19-8_6 floated in the void. It was an Imperial monitor satellite, a bulky mass of machinery and bio-reliquaric components slaved to a deep-space Mandeville point. Kalides-Gamma-19-8_6 had a single purpose: to monitor activity around the Kalides System’s last stable warp translation point.

  From here interstellar warships could break through from the strange dimension of the warp and begin their journey in-system. It fell to the augur probe, and several dozen more like it, to monitor all new arrivals and send word of their coming to the inhabited worlds deeper in-system.

  Kalides-Gamma-19-8_6 had hung in place for decades. In that time, precisely twenty-seven starships had translated into real space beneath its watchful ocular receptors.

  Now, came the twenty-eighth.

  Auto-scriptoral data feeds scrolled through the probe’s artificial cortex.

  Auto-inquisitions answered auspicatory sweep readings, but as its machine-spirit prepared to catalogue another uneventful sweep, the probe’s cogitations were broken as a priority signum-interdiction signal flared within its empyric augurs.

  The augur probe’s void-hardened lenses refocused. Its empyric signums whirred to life, drinking in data on every spectrum as reality buckled. The starfield warped and rippled in a patch a hundred miles across. Light bent in the probe’s staring fisheye-lens as though contorting in the grip of a black hole. Witchfires sparked and died in the darkness, each flare scorching the skin of reality.

  Rents appeared, matter peeling away in strips like flesh from a leper’s face,

  and ectoplasm spilled through, billowing in geysers and glowing with an eerie light.

  Real space convulsed, crumpling and stretching all at once before ripping open like a fractal wound.

  From within burst a starship.

  It tumbled, engines firing as it fought to right itself. The ship’s Geller field tattered amidst dancing corposants, revealing a craft almost a mile long, a buttressed Imperial warship whose battered hull plates were scorched and dented. Behind it, the tear in reality writhed madly, tendrils of dirty light groping blindly as if seeking to snatch back their prize before it could escape.

  As the warp anomaly collapsed in upon itself and the starship sailed free, Kalides-Gamma-19-8_6 worked furiously to codify and categorise, to scan and transmit. Info-spools whirred within its armoured carapace, preparing a package of intelligence ready to be beamed through its aquila-carved macro-array. Machine-spirit interrogations determined the ship’s designation as a strike cruiser – a Space Marine vessel. Further rapid auto-scans detected and classified the heraldry of the Ultramarines Chapter, from the noble world of Macragge.

  The probe worked diligently, still attempting choristry with the on-board machine-spirits of the Ultramarines strike cruiser even as the warship bore down upon it. Retro-thrusters fired in the probe’s flanks, trying to shunt it out of the starship’s path, and Kalides-Gamma-19-8_6 was still busily compiling its vox-package when it was annihilated by the impact of the onrushing craft.

  The probe exploded, a brief starburst of fire against the armoured flank of the vessel.

  It left a slight scorch mark upon the strike cruiser’s starboard prow plating, directly below the ship’s name: Primarch’s Sword.

  Within the armoured hull of the strike cruiser, a robed helot hastened along a corridor lit by strobing emergency lumens. He gripped the guide rails with one hand, ignoring the canted angle of the corridor and the shuddering gravity fluctuations. In his other hand, he clutched a freshly scribed data-parchment, intended for the eyes of the most important warriors on the ship.

  He passed beneath the watchful eye-lenses of gothic gargoyles. He hurried across a gantry above a gun deck where servitors fought to extinguish fires and medicae teams saw to the wounded. He brushed past other helots, each

  hurrying along on their own missions; many of his fellow servants were wounded, or hollow-eyed from lack of sleep.

  The helot halted for a moment as the Primarch’s Sword gave an especially violent jolt, and a groan of stressed metal rolled through the air. His eyes darted to the dark corners, whites shrinking around his pupils. He recalled the unnatural entities that had attempted to manifest during the strike cruiser’s violent trip through warp space. The ship’s Geller field had kept the warp-things at bay, but all the same the helot’s thoughts turned to the reassuring weight of the bolt pistol holstered at his hip. No servant of the Ultramarine
s was defenceless…

  ‘Emperor give your servant strength,’ he muttered, ‘and protect this unworthy soul from the terrors of the outer dark.’

  Slowly the shuddering beneath his feet subsided, and the corridor righted itself as the Primarch’s Sword restabilised its internal gravity. The helot made the sign of the aquila over the stylised white U emblazoned on his chest, then hurried on.

  The helot arrived at the gold-embossed doors to the ship’s strategium. Two Primaris Space Marines stood guard outside, bolt rifles held across their armoured chests. The warriors were demi-gods in the helot’s eyes. Their fully enclosing suits of blue power armour, their proud helms with the faintly glowing eye-lenses, their thrumming back-mounted power packs – all of this filled him with a near-religious awe.

  He approached with his eyes cast respectfully downwards, and one of the Ultramarines nodded in acknowledgement.

  ‘Proceed,’ said the warrior, his vox-amplified voice a deep rumble.

  The doors slid aside, and the helot passed into the strategium. The chamber was high-ceilinged and decorated with marble statuary. A huge hololithic table squatted at its centre, and banks of cogitators and strategic auspex shrines lined its walls. The strategium was large enough to hold twenty armoured Adeptus Astartes, but for now it contained just three Primaris Space Marines, the noble lords who led this strike force.

  They were stood around the holotable, and their eyes turned to the helot as he entered. The gravity of their combined gaze almost pinned him in place.

  He approached Lieutenant Cassian, holding out the data-parchment to the strike force’s commanding officer.

  ‘Missive from Shipmaster Aethor, my lord,’ said the helot. ‘He deemed it

  too urgent to await restoration of ship-wide vox.’

  The Primaris lieutenant took the illuminated plastek printout, his noble features set in a stern frown.

  ‘My thanks…’

  ‘Kallem, my lord,’ said the helot.

  ‘My thanks, Kallem,’ said Cassian. He unfurled the parchment, his eyes scanning its contents with inhuman speed.

  ‘What is the word?’ asked Librarian Keritraeus. The helot’s eyes flicked involuntarily towards the psyker, drawn to the nest of cabling that punctured his scalp, and his dark eyes like wells of secrets.

  ‘The shipmaster is pleased to inform us that, with the aid of Navigator X’gol, we have escaped the empyric storm that has gripped the ship these past days,’ said Cassian.

  ‘That much was obvious,’ grunted Chaplain Dematris. The Chaplain’s black armour and skull helm stood out in dark contrast to his comrades’ blue armour. Dematris’ mace-like crozius was laid on the holotable before him, a symbol of both his spiritual authority and his martial might.

  ‘He goes on,’ said Cassian dryly. ‘The initial damage report from the tech-magi estimates the Primarch’s Sword to be operating at fifty-two per cent combat effectiveness. We’ve lost several gun decks to fires and munitions detonations, and the aft void shield generators are inactive. Ship-wide vox is down, and we’ve lost more than half of the hull auspex.’

  ‘And our warp drive?’ asked Keritraeus.

  ‘Magos Lamdaxh has been forced to render it quiescent for fear of empyric feedback or malefic overspill.’

  ‘Then we are crippled,’ said Dematris angrily. ‘Without the power of our warp drive to pierce the veil, we are reduced to conventional drives. A journey that would take us days in warp space would require years under such conventional power. We have no way of rejoining the Indomitus Crusade, or even of letting our comrades know that we still live.’

  ‘Does the honoured magos suggest how long it will take him to effect repairs?’ asked Librarian Keritraeus.

  ‘He does not,’ replied Cassian. ‘But let us assume for now that the gates of the warp are closed to us.’

  ‘Then what is our course of action?’ asked Dematris. ‘We surely haven’t succeeded in the pacification of Knossa only to be cast adrift in the

  interstellar darkness – that would not serve the Emperor’s will.’

  Lieutenant Cassian punched a runic sequence into the holotable, muttering the rites of awakening as he did so. The device flickered to life, crafting a three-dimensional map of local space in the air from light and shadow. The Primarch’s Sword sat at its centre, a blue-and-gold rune, and around it the map slowly expanded as the ship’s remaining auspicators wove a data-fresco of its surroundings.

  ‘There are machine-spirit acknowledgements from deep-void satellites,’ said Cassian. ‘That would put us on the fringes of a star system, at least.’

  ‘There,’ said Keritraeus, pointing as further runes flickered into life. ‘An asteroid belt. A gas giant. A death world.’

  ‘More planets,’ said Cassian, ‘and with Imperial designators. By the Emperor’s grace, we have come to a settled system, my brothers.’

  Astrogation data scrolled down one side of the map. Names began to appear in flickering, High Gothic script as the bridge crew worked to triangulate their position.

  ‘The Kalides System,’ Cassian read aloud. ‘And there, the capital world –

  Kalides Prime. Tithe-grade secundus, which would suggest sufficient orbital docks to hasten our repairs.’

  ‘Even better…’ said Keritraeus, tapping commands into the holotable’s runic keys. The display focused on Kalides Prime, expanding the world into a slowly spinning orb and projecting additional information in a halo around it.

  ‘An astropathic relay,’ said Cassian, allowing himself a tight smile. ‘This is good news. Not only can we repair the Primarch’s Sword, but with the mind-choir of that planet’s astropaths we can pierce the veil and send word to the Indomitus Crusade. We will let them know of our success on Knossa, and coordinate our rendezvous with the crusade fleet. We will return to the primarch’s side.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Dematris. ‘But let us take Knossa as a warning. According to this feed, the last confirmed contact with any world of the Kalides System was almost two years ago.’

  ‘Not so unusual,’ observed Keritraeus. ‘The Imperium is a vast realm, and since the opening of the Great Rift it has been harder than ever to travel safely between the stars. This would hardly be the first isolated-yet-loyal system the Indomitus Crusade has brought back into the fold.’

  ‘True,’ said Dematris. ‘But the corrupting influence of Chaos pervades the

  galaxy. Before the flesh-cults rose from the shadows to seize power, I don’t doubt that Knossa was loyal also. Following the teachings of the primarch, I suggest the theoretical that we find ourselves in a hostile system until it is proven otherwise.’

  ‘Wise counsel, Brother-Chaplain,’ said Cassian. ‘I will order Shipmaster Aethor to proceed under combat conditions, and have all battle-brothers stand ready for an engagement. Should the people of this system prove to be traitors, we will wrest control of Kalides Prime by force. We must be bellicose in this. Until we can achieve a true sidereal fix, it is impossible to know how much time we lost within the jaws of the warp. And we have our

  orders.’

  Cassian keyed a sequence of runes, and the image of Kalides Prime was replaced by a towering warrior clad in magnificently ornamented armour. All but forgotten by the three Space Marines, Kallem gasped at the imposing sight of the Ultramarines’ primarch, Roboute Guilliman. Even rendered in a grainy hololithic recording, the Lord of Ultramar exuded such a god-like presence that the helot was driven to his knees in awe.

  ‘My sons,’ said Guilliman, his voice rich, deep and utterly commanding. ‘As the Indomitus Crusade gathers pace, we drive like a spear into the heartlands of my father’s Imperium. So the dangers to our flanks grow manifold, and must be addressed. Captain Adrastean has already given you your orders, but allow me to say this to you. You are all newforged, all Primaris battle-brothers. You are the product of my will and Archmagos Cawl’s labours.

  You are the ultimate warriors of the Imperium of Mankind, the torchbearers who will drive
back the shadows in this darkest of hours. Know that you have my absolute faith. Let that knowledge strengthen your arms and gird your souls. Prevail, gloriously, swiftly, then return to my side. There are always more foes to be fought. The crusade must continue.’

  The holorecording came to an end, and was replaced again by the image of Kalides Prime. Cassian, Keritraeus and Dematris looked at one another.

  ‘We have a duty to perform, and no time to waste,’ said Cassian. ‘We will not shame Captain Adrastean, and we will not fail our gene-sire.’

  The lieutenant turned to face Kallem, who tried to control his shaking body and rose unsteadily to his feet.

  ‘Kallem,’ said Cassian. ‘You will bear these orders to the shipmaster. He is to make all speed for Kalides Prime, and to stop for nothing. The magi and

  Techmarines are to make what repairs they can while en route. It will take us sixteen hours to reach the planet from this position, and I expect the Primarch Sword’s combat effectiveness to be increased at least twenty per cent by the time we do. External vox is to remain shrouded unless we receive Imperial hails first – the shipmaster should assume that we are in hostile space until it is proven otherwise.’

  Kallem nodded, saluting the lieutenant with the sign of the aquila.

  ‘At once, my lord.’

  He turned and marched away, the image of the primarch’s features still burned into his mind.

  ‘Wise,’ said Dematris as the doors slid shut behind the helot. ‘Replaying that holorecording. It stoked the fires of that man’s faith, and those flames will spread.’

  Cassian smiled. ‘It was for our benefit as much as his, Dematris.’

  ‘Sixteen hours, then,’ said Keritraeus. ‘Ample time to prepare ourselves for whatever lies ahead. I will meditate, and focus my powers. Passage through the warp storm was… unpleasant. I need to refortify my mind.’

  ‘I will look to matters spiritual,’ said Dematris, hefting his crozius. ‘There will be those who wish to make their devotions in the Reclusiam. Besides which, duty requires reconsecration.’

  ‘It will be good to wield that blade again,’ said Cassian. ‘Almost enough to make me hope that Kalides does play host to heretics.’

  ‘Always hope for enemies to slay,’ quoted Dematris. ‘For in their spilled blood will the Imperium be washed clean.’