Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  The captain buckled his helmet, pulling the chin strap tight. Embedded on the front was his medal – the medal he was known for. An eagle-winged gateway marked by a central skull, glinting in the dim light of pre-dawn coming through the stained glass window. The Ward of Cadia, flashing silver on the black blast helmet.

  ‘Ready to stare into the Eye itself, sir.’ Corrun said.

  Thade smiled as he fastened the last buckle on his flak armour jacket, and strapped on his weapon belt. A heavy calibre bolt pistol hung against his left hip. Against his right thigh rested an ornate chainsword, its iron finish polished to chrome brightness, with acid-etched runes in stylised High Gothic along the blade’s sides. To say a blade like that was worth a fortune would be to underestimate by no small degree. Lord generals wielded blades of poorer quality.

  ‘Is Rax ready?’ the captain asked, hope evident in his voice.

  ‘No, sir, not yet.’

  ‘Ah, well. Let’s go see what Dead Man’s Hand has found.’

  Chapter II

  Shrine

  Solthane, Monastic sector

  ‘Count the Seven,’ the vox recording crackled. The words were broken by distortion, but clear enough to be sure. Captain Thade’s squads of the Cadian 88th, a full three hundred men and thirty support vehicles, moved out ten minutes later. The potential sighting of primary threats necessitated nothing less than a full response.

  Dawn wasn’t far away, though even in the daylight Solthane remained grey. The funeral pyres of weeks before still blackened the sky with dark cloud cover that refused to dissipate, and the habitation spires were discoloured by the smoke that until so recently had choked the skies.

  With hulls the colour of iron and charcoal – a drabness that matched their surroundings – Chimera troop transports rumbled four abreast down city avenues, treads grinding precious mosaics into shards beneath the weight of the tanks. When the erratic city layout required divergent routes, the troop carriers navigated narrow streets and alleys in single file.

  Occasional sniper fire from PDF remnant forces was answered with squads deployed to sweep and cleanse buildings by the side of the road, and orders to catch up when they could. Vox contact was a joke, but Thade wasn’t worried. He trusted his men to do their jobs and get back in line without a hitch. They were no strangers to urban warfare. No Cadian was.

  The convoy rode on towards the burning monastery, towards Dead Man’s Hand, and towards primary-class threats that might or might not actually exist. The atmosphere within each of the tanks was an unsmiling mix of professional readiness and a muted sense of grim anticipation. No one wanted to engage primary threats unless the odds were heavily stacked in the Cadians’ favour, but duty was duty. The Shock knew it was better they handled this than any of the other regiments garrisoned in Solthane.

  The Janus 6th was a green unit. If the intercepted vox traffic wasn’t just twisted propaganda or vox-ghosts, then they were already dead. Their ambitious assignment to hold the monastery, the great Shrine of the Emperor’s Unending Majesty, was over almost as soon as it had begun.

  Thade focused, rolling his shoulders in his matt-black flak armour and checking his chainsword for the eighth or ninth time. It was almost an hour since he’d woken and the last vestiges of the memory dream were finally fading from his mind. He hated to remember Cadia. Remembering home led his thoughts into how he and his men should be back there even now, and to the Eye with this upstart bastard of a lord general that demanded Cadian units be withdrawn from the front line of the Despoiler’s Crusade to help with his little shrineworld reclamation.

  The familiar rattling of the armoured personnel carrier soothed his thoughts. His right hand, gloved in black, whirred with soft mechanical purrs as he closed his fingers into a fist. He felt the rough mechanics of his augmetic wrist and knuckle-joints rotating, hearing the low buzzing clicks between the infrequent metallic judders of the Chimera’s interior.

  ‘Captain?’ the driver called.

  Thade rose from his seat in the passenger compartment and moved to lean on the driver’s seat from behind. Through the wide vision slit, the soot-blackened marble of Kathur’s largest cathedral district was visible. This was the heart of Solthane, in all its fire-touched majesty.

  ‘What a cesspit,’ the driver said. It was Corrun, as always, driving Thade’s command Chimera.

  ‘You’re quite the poet,’ said the captain. ‘Now talk to me.’

  ‘Two minutes, sir. We… Wait, hang on, we’ve got a roadblock.’ The compartment shuddered as if kicked by a Titan, generating a roar of complaints from the ten soldiers strapped into their seats in the back. Thade’s mechanical hand snapped vice-tight on the hand rail, keeping his balance.

  ‘Roadblock cleared,’ the driver grinned.

  ‘Go around the next one, Corrun,’ Thade tried not to imagine what that roadblock had just been. ‘You said two minutes?’

  ‘Confirmed, sir. Just under two minutes until we come up on where Dead Man’s Hand have withdrawn. These streets are a bitch. Not exactly made for tanks.’

  ‘Pilgrim roads. I hear you.’ Thade narrowed his violet eyes and stared out of the vision slit. The limited vista on display raced past in a blur of blackened buildings. ‘I can’t see a damn thing out there. Any third-class threats so far?’

  ‘Constantly, sir.’ Again with the trademark grin. ‘What do you think that last roadblock was?’

  ‘Delightful. You’re ploughing down plague victims now. What happened to respecting the dead?’

  ‘They’re not exactly respecting us.’

  This generated chuckles from the soldiers in the rear.

  ‘Point,’ Thade conceded, ‘but you know where the orders came from. These people were Imperial citizens, Corrun. Pilgrims. Priests.’

  ‘I heard the stories, Cap. They were faithless. “Only the faithless will fall to this plague”, isn’t that what we’ve been told a thousand times?’

  Thade dropped it. He didn’t want to dredge this up again because he found it hard to argue with his driver tonight. He believed as Corrun did. The faithless had fallen. They deserved this fate. To hell with a mandate for ‘clean kills at all times’ and ‘preserving the plague-slain to be redeemed in consecrated incineration’.

  But Kathur Reclamation protocol stressed respect for the victims of the Curse of Unbelief. The lord general was keen to foster political allies within the Ecclesiarchy by retaking this world as cleanly and carefully as possible. The emphasis on respecting the tainted dead was just one more petty protocol in a long list that Thade hated to think about since he’d made planetfall. Destroying the dead wasn’t enough. They had to be put down with grace, gathered by Guardsmen with a hundred better things to do, and ritually burned in the reactivated funerary cremation facilities.

  By the Emperor’s grace, the 88th hadn’t been selected for gathering duties yet. Killing those that refused to die was bad enough.

  ‘Drive,’ Thade said. ‘And don’t argue. Besides, if Enginseer Osiron finds out you’re using my command Chimera to ram gangs of plague victims clogging the road, he’ll have your head. It’s an insult to the machine-spirit.’

  Corrun, grinning like he’d won a month’s wages, wrenched the steering wheel to the left. Another three souls in the ruined rags of Kathurite pilgrims met their final end under the churning tracks of the racing troop transport. There was a brief wrenching of gears as something – some part of one of the plague victims – got caught up in the APC’s moving parts.

  Thade closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I never want to hear that again.’

  ‘It was a purr!’

  ‘You’re good, Corrun. But you’re not irreplaceable. It would grieve me to see you shot for disrespect. Play safe this time. By the book, and no hacking off the machine-spirit.’

  ‘Not at all.’ The driver licked his lips. ‘The old girl likes it rough.’
<
br />   ‘When I say “ramming speed”, then you get to play your game.’

  ‘Understood, sir.’

  Thade’s vox-bead pulsed in his ear. The captain tapped the earpiece, activating the fingernail-sized receiver strapped to his throat. As he spoke, it picked up the vibrations from his larynx and filtered out background noise.

  ‘Captain Thade, Cadian 88th.’

  ‘Count the Seven,’ someone hissed. Even through the vox distortion, the voice was wet and burbling. ‘Count the Seven.’

  Thade cut the link.

  ‘New orders?’ asked Corrun.

  ‘Just vox-ghosts.’ Thade turned to the ten soldiers in the back. Each one watched him – quiet, attentive, at the ready. ‘Janden,’ he nodded to his vox-operator. ‘Change command frequency and share the new wavelength with the other squads. The current one is compromised.’

  He saw the question in Janden’s eyes but gave no answer. The vox-officer leaned down to where his bulky backpack was secured by his seat, and made the necessary adjustments to his communication gear.

  ‘Done, sir.’

  Thade gripped the handrail running the length of the ceiling, supporting himself against the shakes. ‘Get me Dead Man’s Hand. Patch Vertain through to my ear-piece.’

  ‘You’re live.’

  ‘Vertain, this is the captain. Acknowledge.’ Thade listened to the reply, and narrowed his eyes. ‘Thirty seconds, Vertain. That’s all.’

  He switched to the command channel. ‘88th, at the ready! Disembark in thirty seconds! The plaza ahead is flooded with plague-slain and Dead Man’s Hand needs extraction. We go in, we kill anything not wearing our colours, and we move on to the monastery. Corrun…’

  ‘Sir?’ He was already grinning again.

  ‘Ramming speed.’

  The autocannon roared.

  ‘Fall back!’ Vertain cried, wrenching his control sticks. His walker reversed, the backwards-jointed legs protesting with a hiss of angry pistons. Solid rounds pinged and clanged from the pod’s sloped armour, while the Sentinel’s underslung cannon replied in a percussive burst of thunderclap after thunderclap.

  The plaza had erupted in gunfire a few minutes before. An expanse of concrete inlaid with a mosaic of the saint formed a courtyard between several towering temples. The squadron had been scouting here when the first sniper shots rang out. Within a minute, plague-slain were shambling from the temples, led by cultists wearing ragged remains of Kathurite PDF uniforms. They came in a tide, immediately broken in places as the Sentinels opened up with their autocannons, drowning out the grunts and wails of the dead.

  ‘We are not dying here,’ Vertain spoke into his vox-link. ‘Break formation and fall back.’ He never heard an acknowledgement from the others. He could barely hear his own voice over the carnage unfolding around his walker.

  The squadron wasn’t going to win a straight-up fight, and they all knew it. They were scouts, and the Sentinels were armed for taking shots at armoured infantry and light tanks. The high-calibre rounds from the walkers’ autocannons were tearing holes in the crowds of plague-slain, but they were next to useless against such a horde.

  Greer’s walker staggered, almost thrown from balance as its stabilisers strained to deal with striding over piles of moving corpses. In a move worthy of a medal, Vertain saw the other pilot condense his leg pistons, lowering his cockpit pod for a moment, then spring upwards to clear the mound of writhing dead he’d been standing atop. Greer landed with a thudding clank that shook the ground, turning as he walked backwards and opening fire on the plague-slain again. A swarm of corpses dressed as monks flew apart in a grey-red cloud as three autocannon rounds hit home.

  ‘That was beautiful,’ said Vertain through clenched teeth as he kept laying down fire.

  ‘I look forward to my promotion,’ crackled Greer.

  Vertain joined his fire arc to Greer’s, and felt his Sentinel’s gait start to drag. He was limping now, limping badly.

  ‘You’ve got three of them on your right leg, sir,’ Greer crackled. ‘Kick them free.’

  Vertain tried. His Sentinel replied by lurching violently to the right with a screech of protesting stabilisers. Alarms flashed across his console as his leg pistons vented air pressure.

  ‘They’ve ruined my stabilisers. I’m not kicking anything for a while.’ As he spoke, Vertain’s cockpit tilted again. His helmeted head smacked against the side of his pod, the pain painting his vision in a palette of greys.

  The dead were climbing his walker now. He heard their fists beating on the armour plating on his cockpit. They might even drag him down if enough of them could scramble up.

  His vox sparked live with a burst of static. ‘Vertain, this is the captain.’ Emperor’s blood, Thade’s voice was clear. He sounded close. ‘Acknowledge.’

  With sick on his breath and half-blind through a concussion, Vertain reported the situation, ending with the four words Captain Thade had been praying not to hear.

  ‘Dead Man’s Hand: Broken.’

  ‘Thirty seconds, Vertain. That’s all.’

  It turned out to be just under twenty seconds.

  The Chimeras tore into the plaza, a rolling thunderhead that slammed into the horde of wailing dead. Black as a panther, the command Chimera pounded into the first group, grinding them into bloody gobbets. It swerved to a halt, cutting down the plague-slain nearby with angry beams of light from its multilaser turret. The irritated whine of high-energy las-fire shrilled above the moans and crunches of combat.

  The other Chimeras, their hulls a gun-metal grey, followed in the wake of destruction. Dozer blades bolted to the front of the troop transports – specifically banned from ungentle use in clearing roads of corpses – now hammered the plague-slain to the ground to be crushed under heavy treads.

  The drivers spread out to form a protective ring around the embattled walkers, turret fire slicing through the bodies of anyone approaching the tanks. In a chorus of clangs, thirty rear ramps slammed down onto the mosaic ground, and the 88th spilled from their transports: guns up and firing red flashes. Thade was first out of his Chimera, chainsword raised and howling.

  ‘Secure the walkers! For the Emperor!’

  The captain’s first foe wasn’t dead. A PDF traitor ran at him, slowed by the disease ravaging his body. In his fist was a broken bayonet. Thade’s chainsword sang in a savage backhand swing, and the traitor’s head left his shoulders.

  ‘First blood to Cadia!’ someone shouted to his left.

  The fight lasted less than two minutes. Lasguns cracked out head-shots in orderly volleys, scything down the enemy in waves. The Cadians stayed shoulder to shoulder in their squads, taking no casualties in the brief battle. When the last of the plague-slain was dragged from the leg of Vertain’s walker and shot in the back of the head, Thade holstered his pistol. The sergeants from all fifteen squads ringed him, every man standing ankle-deep in the dead. The stench rising around was enough for several men to don their rebreather masks.

  ‘Eighty-eighth: status.’

  ‘Unbroken,’ fifteen squad leaders chorused.

  ‘Unbroken,’ Vertain sat in his cockpit, the door opened so he could speak freely. He made the sign of the aquila. ‘Close call, though.’

  Thade nodded. ‘We move to retake the Shrine of the Emperor’s Unending Majesty. We’re hearing nothing from the Janus Sixth in there, and if they have any survivors left, they’re almost certainly retreating deeper into the monastery.’ Every eye turned to the building a kilometre away through the winding streets. Half of it still burned. ‘We’re going in – securing it where the Janusians failed – and waiting to be reinforced. If the resistance is beyond our capabilities, then we get comfortable and ask Reclamation command what they want us to do. Questions?’

  ‘Primary threats?’ asked one of the sergeants.

  ‘Potentially. Nothing soli
d yet. If we find them, we take them down. If there are too many, we consolidate and await reinforcement. Vertain, report.’

  The Sentinel pilot cleared his throat. ‘We pulled back to this plaza when the fighting in the temple grounds abated. We were looking for a staging ground, sir. The last we saw at the monastery, the enemy’s rearguard was following the forward elements in. The main doors were breached. Six, maybe seven hundred Remnant,’ he said, referring to Kathurite PDF traitors. ‘Double the number of plague-slain.’

  ‘Seven hundred secondary-class threats, and fifteen hundred third-class,’ the captain confirmed. ‘Nothing changes. We split into three forces, each with specific objectives. I’ll take one hundred men to the central chambers. Lieutenant Horlarn, you take a hundred to the undercroft and make sure there’s no way into the shrine from underground. Lieutenant Darrick, you’ve got the bell towers. Questions?’

  No one spoke.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ said Thade. ‘Now move.’

  Resistance was nowhere to be seen. Gaining access to the monastery proved to be uncomfortably easy.

  The towering gates were broken, torn from their hinges, and there was little sign of enemy forces outside of a few shambling loners wandering around the expansive courtyard. These ended their pathetic existences under precision las-fire, as the Guardsmen filed from their Chimeras and moved in squads up the wide marble stairway to the front entrance. The air reeked of the dead and the burning sections of the monastery itself, a potent musk that again inspired a lot of rebreather use.

  Minutes became hours. Deep within the labyrinthine monastery, the Shrine of the Emperor’s Unending Majesty, almost three hundred soldiers of the Cadian 88th were on the hunt. Bodies of plague victims littered the stone floor, just as they did in each passage and chamber the Cadians had passed through in the last few hours. The Janusians hadn’t just been besieged; they’d been infiltrated and annihilated. Bodies of the regiment, blood soaking their urban camouflage gear, were strewn everywhere in the monastery alongside the enemy dead.