Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  This was a problem. The only half-reliable vox-channel Vertain had been able to use through Kathur’s interference was a route back to main headquarters. Main headquarters was three dozen kilometres away in the wrong direction. Help wasn’t coming from there, and they weren’t the ones that needed to be told about this development just yet – even if they couldn’t already tell from orbital surveillance. Other ears needed to hear it now.

  To make matters worse, they apparently had an idiot manning the forward recon channel tonight. So far Vertain had managed to relay his ID code, and that was about it. He’d been trying for over five minutes. Interference or not… You’d think they could’ve boosted the signal by now. I’ll bet a year’s pay this bastard isn’t Cadian.

  ‘This is Scout-Lieutenant Adar Vertain of the Cadian 88th. I am leading the recon mission to assess the progress of the Janus Sixth. Put me through to Captain Parmenion Thade.’ He spilled out the rough coordinates where the rest of the regiment was based in the city for the night.

  ‘Repeat, please.’

  Vertain brought his walker to a halt. It stood in the dead street, juddering as its engine idled. The spotlight beamed forward into nothingness, slicing into a dark alley between two silent buildings. This city was a tomb.

  ‘In the name of the Emperor, the Janus Sixth is up to its neck in it. Get me a vox-link to my captain, immediately.’

  ‘Insurgency Walker C-Eighty-Eight Primus-Alpha. Your signal is weak. Repeat, please.’

  Vertain swore, and killed the link. ‘I hate this planet.’

  Control sticks gripped in gloved hands, Vertain pushed forward and set the noisy Sentinel clanking ahead in a slow stride of graceless machinery. The searchlight bolted to the cheek of the walker’s pilot pod tore left and right in the darkness, cutting a harsh white glare through the deserted streets.

  Abandoned buildings. Bodies here and there. Nothing but silence.

  Vertain was unshaven, as if he’d spent so much time hiding within his Sentinel’s cockpit that he’d not had the opportunity to shave in a week. This wasn’t too far from the truth.

  ‘Vertain to Dead Man’s Hand. Acknowledge signal.’ Four voices came back in turn as each member of the Sentinel squadron voxed to their officer. No one was dead. That was something, at least. ‘Form up in parallel streets and proceed to the main plaza ahead. Stalking pattern: Viridian. Tonight we’re the Emperor’s eyes, not his fists.’

  ‘Acknowledge pattern: Viridian,’ came three of the four voices.

  ‘Copy that. No heroics,’ came the last.

  The Sentinels, scattered but each within scanner range of all four others, strode towards the burning monastery. Occasional gunfire rang out as they annihilated small groups of plague-slain, destroying the tainted dead that clung to false life, roving the streets in packs.

  Splayed claw-feet of battered, blessed iron stomped on the smooth stone roads. Vertain rode with the gentle side-to-side motion of his Sentinel’s gait, as familiar to him as standing in his own boots.

  The capital city Solthane was built in worship of the Emperor and His great saint, Kathur. Its one purpose was to look beautiful: a purpose hundreds of planetary governors and ranking Ecclesiarchs had been building on for thousands of years as new shrines, places of pilgrimage, monuments and chapel-habs were erected. All sense of the original layout was centuries lost, buried and distorted in the ever-expanding mass of new construction.

  Solthane now, torn back metre by metre by the Imperial Guard, was a labyrinth of winding and meandering streets populated only by abandoned traders’ carts still filled with cheap wares and false relics. Deserted promenades were punctuated by marble statues depicting Kathur, lesser saints, and the nameless Raven Guard heroes who had originally served in the war to take the world, ten thousand years ago in the Great Crusade. Shortcut alleys twisted in the shadows of the towering chapel-hab blocks, all of which were encrusted with granite angels staring down at the dead city.

  In his opinion – and as lead scout for the Cadian 88th, his opinion counted in every planning session he bothered to speak it – Vertain believed the chapel-habs were the worst aspect of the city’s current state. The habitation towers dominated the skyline, thrusting up at random wherever there had been space to house the vast numbers of pilgrims forever moving through the city. Solthane was beauty turned to ugliness in its rich excess, and it gave enemy troops a million places to hide. The chapel-habs now stood as great apartment spires filled with the dead. No regiment wanted to draw the duty of cleansing those places, seeking out agents of the Archenemy lurking among the plague-slain. No one wanted to risk walking knee-deep in bodies only for the plague-slain to rise again.

  Ahead of Vertain, the monastery burned, filling his viewing slits with orange warmth. His scanner choked in bursts through static, but he could see the walls lining the edge of the holy site’s grounds rising up at the end of the street. His walker stomped closer, iron feet thudding onto the stone road. No enemies were visible outside the thirty-metre high walls, but at this range Vertain could hear the faint crack of countless lasguns and the heavy chatter of bolt weapons. The Janus 6th was fighting a losing war within the temple grounds. He clicked his vox-link live and was about to try for the captain again, when another voice crackled over.

  ‘Sir, I’ve got… something.’

  The vox was hellishly distorted even at close range, so the other pilot’s voice was garbled, rendering the speaker unidentifiable. It took a glance at the scanner display to see Greer’s placement beacon flashing. He was three streets to the west, close to the front gate of the monastery’s grounds.

  ‘Specifics, Greer,’ said Vertain.

  ‘If I had specifics, I’d give you them. My vox keeps detuning to another frequency.’

  ‘You told me Enginseer Culus fixed that two nights ago.’

  Now was not the time for instrument failure. The enemy could easily pick up stray vox on insecure frequencies. Greer’s instruments had been the subject of repeated repair since he’d taken a rocket hit on the cockpit pod a year ago, fighting heretics in the cities of Beshic V. The scorched and twisted metal that had blackened his walker’s cheek was gone, but the missile’s legacy remained.

  ‘He did fix it. I’m saying it’s shaken loose again. I’m hearing… something. I’ll pulse the frequency over. Listen for yourself.’

  ‘Send me the frequency.’

  ‘Can… hear… at?’ Greer asked in a surge of vox crackle. Vertain tuned his receiver and narrowed his eyes. In his headset, a whispering voice hissed the same three words in an endless monotone.

  Count the Seven... Count the Seven... Count the Seven...

  ‘I hear it.’

  ‘That’s what they heard at Kasr Partain,’ Greer said. ‘Back when home first burned.’ Vertain nodded, feeling the words leave a bitter taste on his tongue. Kasr Partain had been one of the first fortress-cities to fall on Cadia, only a handful of months before. Home was still burning, damn it. And they should be back there fighting for it, not wandering like rats in this city of the dead, half a sector away.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’m here,’ Vertain swallowed back a bitter growl. ‘I’m here.’

  He set his Sentinel striding forward again, opening a channel to the whole squad. ‘Vertain to Dead Man’s Hand. Change of plans. Everyone form up on my position immediately. Stay in visual range of one another from now on. Search pattern: Unity.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ the chorus came back.

  ‘Farl, you head back to the captain. Cycle vox channels as you run, alerting high command as well as Captain Thade. This is not something the lord general will learn from orbital picts, and he needs to be told immediately.’

  ‘What’s the exact message, sir?’ Farl asked.

  Vertain told him what to say. The silence from the other pilots was deafening as they digested the revelation. After Farl ha
d voxed an acknowledgement and broken away from the loose formation, Vertain sat in the creaking leather seat, his pounding heart the loudest sound in the cloistered confines of his cockpit.

  The rest of C-Eighty-Eight Alpha closed around him, drawing alongside in an orchestra of rattles and clanks. Each walker had a playing card painted on the cheek, above the stencilled pilot’s name. Dead Man’s Hand, the elite Sentinel squadron of the Cadian 88th Mechanised Infantry.

  ‘We need visual confirmation of this. Prime weapons, check your coolant feeds,’ their leader said. ‘And follow me.’

  Captain Parmenion Thade hadn’t been home in three months, except in his nightmares.

  The reports from Cadia still listed over sixty per cent of the planet in the hands of the Archenemy, but the numbers were almost meaningless. The statistics were cold and uncomfortable, but nowhere near as raw and real as his memories. Those memories replayed behind his eyes each night. Over and over, he saw his world fall.

  The Thirteenth Black Crusade. For the first time in ten thousand years of defeat, a Warmaster of Chaos walked the soil of Cadia. The Archenemy finally had its first real victory, and the Cadians their first real defeat.

  The sky had burned for weeks. Literally, it burned. The fires of the fortress-cities choked the heavens from horizon to horizon. Amongst the flames of burning cities, defence cannons roared into the sky, defying the landing attempts of enemy troop ships. This was not some provincial world with a volunteer Planetary Defence Force. This was Cadia, warden-world of the only navigable path from the Ocularis Terribus into the Imperium. The planet was second only to Holy Terra in its might and importance.

  Cathedral-like vessels of Battlefleet Scarus ringed the world, filling the night sky with their anger as they fired upon the Chaos fleet pouring towards the planet. Every city on the surface was a bastion of gun emplacements and void shield generators. Every citizen had trained to fire a lasrifle from their pre-teen childhoods. The planet itself resisted the attack.

  By the time Kasr Vallock was lost to the flames of invasion, the populace was already underground. Regiments of the Cadian Shock and the Interior Guard guided the fleeing citizens into the tunnels beneath the city, engaged in a fighting retreat as the legions of the Archenemy flooded into the tunnels in pursuit. It was these tunnels that Thade dreamed of.

  Each night, he heard his men shouting his name again, over and over. They needed orders. They needed ammunition. They needed to get out of the tunnels before the enemy destroyed the power reactors in the city above. Already, the evacuation tunnels were shaking, raining dirt on the fleeing defenders. They were far from the evacuation carriers that would take them to another Kasr.

  Thade had turned to hear the howling sounds of their pursuers. He still had both his hands then, two hands of flesh, blood and bone. As he barked orders – orders for bayonets and blades for anyone out of ammunition – those hands gunned his chainsword into life. He’d fired his bolt pistol’s last round in the bloodbath that erupted when the traitors spilled through the Kasr’s sundered walls two hours before.

  The disruptions above had killed the lights in this section of the tunnel network. The only light now came from the narrow flashlights fixed to the sides of the soldiers’ blast helmets. Two dozen of those beams cut across the passageway at various angles as the men looked this way and that, using the respite to identify comrades among the survivors.

  The tunnel shook again, showering grit and pebbles of the concrete used to reinforce the passageways. A chunk of stone the size of a child’s fist clacked off the captain’s helmet. Similar debris rained on the others, clattering down several times a minute as they waited in the darkness.

  ‘That isn’t the reactors,’ one soldier said. ‘Too rhythmic. Too loud.’

  ‘Titan,’ another man whispered. ‘There’s a Titan up there.’

  Thade nodded, setting his helmet torch cutting down and up in the blackness. His heart beat against his ribs in anticipation of the next tremor, which shook his bones when it finally came. On the surface above, a towering God-Machine strode unopposed through the burning city. Every soldier down in the darkness knew the odds were heavily against the Titan being one of the Imperium’s own.

  ‘They’re coming, sir,’ someone said in the near-darkness. Thade faced the way his men had come, hearing the enemy’s cries getting closer.

  ‘Men of Cadia!’ Thade’s chainsword roared in emphasis, the sound jagged and close enough to equal the earthshaking footsteps of the gigantic war machine above. ‘The Great Eye has opened and hell itself is coming down that corridor. Stand. Fight. Every son and daughter of this world was born to slay the Emperor’s foes! Our blood flows so humanity may draw breath! No blood more precious!’

  ‘No blood more precious!’ the soldiers shouted as one.

  ‘Calm hearts and ice in your veins,’ Thade spoke softly in the lesser rumblings of the Titan’s wake. Rifles and blades were raised as wild, spasming shapes flashed into view, screaming down the tunnel.

  ‘Eighty-eighth! Fire!’

  A chorus of cracks sounded. The las-fire volley scythed down the first wave of shrieking heretics in front of Thade before they were even in full view. More were rounding the corner and running to where the tunnel widened, but blood of the Emperor, if it was just a handful of cultists down here, they might win this…

  And then he saw it.

  At the heart of the second wave, boots crunching corpses underfoot, came death itself. Like a huntsman leading a pack of dogs, the foe that would take Thade’s right hand towered a metre and more above its lesser minions. Gibbering, howling cultists ran into the tunnel bearing bloody knives and solid-slug pistols. Between them, walking with a distance-eating stride all the more terrifying for its slowness, was an immense figure in ancient armour of filthy bronze and cobalt blue.

  It moved like a dead thing, mindlessly treading forward, scanning left to right with methodical patience. Its helm, warped into the visage of an ancient Terran death mask from some long-dead civilization, emitted a chuckle. The laugh was a hollow, brittle sound that wheezed dust from the archaic helmet’s speaker grille. In the figure’s fists was a bolter of antiquated design, notched with a hundred centuries of wear and tear. The muzzle was coal-black from countless firings on countless battlefields.

  Thade’s men had been firing from the moment the enemy entered the tunnel, but while rag-clad cultists died in droves, their armoured overseer barely flinched at the hail of laser fire glancing from its carapace. It finished its scan of the room, sighting the mortal shouting orders. That was the one that had to die first.

  The Traitor Astartes fired once as it advanced, barely pausing to aim, unleashing the shot that stole Thade’s right arm from the elbow. The Cadian dropped his sword, clutched what remained of his arm, and hit the ground hard. Through the agony of his bolt-destroyed forearm, he could still hear his men crying out, calling his name…

  ‘Captain Thade?’

  He awoke with a jolt as the dream broke. His adjutant, Corrun, stood at the side of his cot. The other man’s expression was serious. ‘News from the Sentinels.’

  Thade sat up. His uniform was crumpled from a restless sleep, and his body armour was neatly stacked on the ground by his bedroll. The 88th was camped for the night in an abandoned museum, sleeping fitfully amongst a thousand minor relics. Here, a golden figurine of a Raven Guard Astartes on a small marble pedestal – shaped by a minor acolyte of Kathur many thousands of years before. There, a cabinet of trinkets once worn by the first of Kathur’s faithful.

  The relics didn’t impress Thade. A pilgrim trap, nothing more: something to keep the visiting devotees busy while they filled the planetary coffers.

  His head still ached from the day-long planning meeting with the lord general earlier, and he let his thoughts clear while he sipped from the standard-issue canteen by his pillow. The museum’s air tasted of dust.
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br />   The water didn’t help much. The chemical compounds used to purify fluid rations left a coppery aftertaste on his tongue. Even knowing all the water was purified aboard the ships in orbit didn’t help morale. The Guard were fighting on a tomb world. The last thing they needed was water that tasted like blood. It was as if the death on Kathur touched everything that came to the planet even after the plague had burned itself out.

  ‘How long was I asleep?’ Thade asked, looking around the half-full chamber where thirty soldiers still slept on.

  ‘Two hours,’ Corrun said, knowing it had been the only two hours Thade had slept in the last fifty.

  ‘Felt like two minutes.’

  ‘Life in the Guard, eh? Sleep when you’re dead.’

  ‘I hear that.’ Thade stretched, not altogether thrilled at the clicks in his back as he arched it. Cadian stoicism was one thing, but… ‘Has anyone shot the Munitorum officer responsible for giving out these bedrolls?’

  Corrun chuckled at his captain’s banter. ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘That’s a crime. I may do it myself.’ Thade was already lacing his boots. ‘Brief me now. What has Dead Man’s Hand found?’

  ‘It’s just Trooper Farl. Vertain’s taken the others closer to the monastery. Vox is down.’

  ‘Vox is down. Throne, I’m sick of that refrain.’

  ‘Farl returned with a message.’

  ‘They’ve sighted primary threats,’ said Thade, not a doubt in his mind. Few other reasons would be severe enough to split the Sentinel squadron.

  ‘They’ve intercepted vox traffic that suggests primary threats close to their position, yes.’

  ‘Listen to you, dancing around the issue.’

  Corrun grinned. It was a grin Thade was very familiar with, and usually preceded something cocky at best, rash at worst. ‘Didn’t want to get your hopes up, sir.’

  ‘How decent of you. So what have they got? Please tell me it’s more than intercepted vox.’

  ‘Just the vox. But Farl’s got a recording, and it… Well, come listen to it.’