Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  Their last stand had been inglorious and, to Cadian eyes, rather unimpressive. The Janus 6th was scattered in a poor defensive spread across the monastery’s series of awe-inspiring sermon chambers, their final resting places showing to the trained glances of the 88th just which soldiers had died fighting, and which ones had broken ranks to seek an escape.

  No sign of primary threats so far. In fact, Thade and his officers had just about abandoned the notion of seeing any first-class targets. They had real problems now – enough tertiary threats to last a lifetime. The plague-slain were everywhere inside the monastery, and in far greater numbers than those seen by Dead Man’s Hand outside.

  Room by room, the Guardsmen cleansed the holy site, cutting down the shrieking dead as they staggered in feral mindlessness, nothing but shells of unfocused malice.

  Poisonous blood showered Captain Thade as he impaled a howling woman with a thrust of his chainsword. A hundred whirring teeth sawed through fleshy resistance, and the woman cried blasphemies as she was disembowelled.

  It was hard to tell the dead ones from those that still lived. Neither would lie down and die when you wanted them to, and they all made the same noises.

  Thade yanked hard, freeing the blade from her torso in a light spray of near-black blood and fragments of flesh that smelled beyond foul. The rot taking hold of the enemy made such work all the easier. Decay softened the flesh, making it weak under Imperial las-fire and vulnerable to the howling bite of chainswords.

  The corpse began to rise again, ponderously clambering to its feet despite being gutted and missing an arm.

  Thade’s blade silenced as he killed the power. He’d been fighting with the weapon for almost half an hour, and his muscles burned with effort. Exhausted to his core, he pulled his bolt pistol and pressed the muzzle against the woman’s broken skull. The air within the monastery was cold, but he blinked stinging sweat from his eyes.

  ‘In the name of the Emperor, just die.’

  The bolt shell hammered into the corpse’s head and exploded within the brain, wetting the Imperial Guard captain with more chunks of decaying matter. A flying shard of skull hit his breastplate with enough force to leave a scratch.

  The sharp cracks of a las-fire chorus died down around him, and Thade’s command squad dispersed around the barely-decorated contemplation chamber. Each of the nine fighters scattered, but stayed in eye contact with at least one other member of the squad. Every man wore dark grey fatigues and black chest armour made filthy from the day’s fighting.

  ‘I need vox,’ Thade called out across the cavernous sermon chamber. Janden moved over to him, jogging around the dip in the floor where a mosaic of the Emperor had been defiled some weeks ago. The room reeked of urine and the vast amounts of animal blood used to deface the image.

  Janden handed Thade the speech horn connected to the bulky vox-scanner on his back.

  ‘You’re live, captain.’

  ‘Squad Venator to Alliance. Acknowledge signal and give me a situation report.’

  The pause of several seconds put Thade’s nerves on edge. There were a million ways this mission could go wrong. Even with the greatest trust in his men, he hated his squads scattered in this hive of the dead.

  ‘Alliance here, captain. Situation: Unbroken. We’re close to the chorus chambers atop the north-eastern bell tower. We need ten, fifteen more minutes to get in place.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ Thade replied, and nodded to Janden. ‘Squad Venator to Fortitude and Adamant. Report.’

  The pause this time lasted longer. Janden shook his head at the captain’s glance; it wasn’t interference. For once.

  ‘Adamant here, captain. Situation: Unbroken. We’re entering the undercroft now.’

  ‘This is Fortitude, Unbroken. Moving with Adamant to support. Heavy resistance in the cellars delayed us. We found where the Remnant were regrouping, and they’re not regrouping anymore, sir. Forty minutes to mission objective.’

  ‘Understood. Be careful,’ Thade said.

  And so it went. Squad Phalanx next, then Endurance and Defiance, on and on down the line. The captain listened to the brief situation reports from each of his fifteen squads. Casualties were light, despite the fighting being fierce.

  Thade led his one hundred men in a loose scattering of squads, moving to take control of the primary altar chambers at the heart of the monastery. Another hundred followed First Lieutenant Horlarn to secure the undercroft and purge the subterranean tombs of the enemy. Second Lieutenant Darrick led the last hundred, securing the four bell towers thrusting up from the monastery’s central domes. The holy building was the size of a small town – the 88th had spent the best part of three hours cutting right to the core of it.

  One last vox-report to make. The most important one.

  ‘This is Captain Thade. 88th reports progress as expected. Resistance medium-to-heavy. No sign of primary targets, repeat: zero sightings on primary threat. Resistance so far, secondary threats twenty per cent, tertiary threats eighty per cent.’

  This simple message was all that was required. He doubted it even reached the lord general’s base, but it still had to be done.

  Janden took the speech horn when Thade handed it back. ‘Only twenty per cent on the secondary threat? Felt like more.’

  Thade smiled at the vox-officer with the bandaged arm. ‘I’ll bet it did.’

  At his order, the squad moved out, heading deeper into the monastery. The chambers grew larger, expanding into halls, each one majestic in size and increasingly grand in ostentation, built by faithful hands many thousands of years ago. Arched walls and ceilings were supported by great spines of stone, thickly jutting from the skeletal architecture. Stylised pillars rose to the roof, each one bathed in the weak dusk light coming through the shattered stained glass windows.

  The ten soldiers in Thade’s squad fanned out, stalking through the near-darkness in a familiar ritual of stops and starts. Run to a pillar. Crouch, rifle up to scan ahead. Run to the next pillar…

  Something cried out ahead. It was either inhuman, or hadn’t been alive in weeks. Thade looked around the pillar he was kneeling behind, one hand on the faded red carpet for balance. He saw nothing, but heard the moan again.

  A few dozen metres ahead of him, the sight blocked by the pillars, a lasgun fired with a single, sharp crack. ‘Contact!’ someone called out. ‘Tertiary threat confirmed.’

  The Cadians advanced, rifles up and no need to hide. A small group of plague victims, no more than twenty, spilled sluggishly from an arch behind a torn red curtain.

  Thade squeezed off a shot with his pistol, detonating the head of the lead curse victim.

  ‘Kill them!’ he shouted, and nine lasguns lit the chamber with flickering red flashes of pinpoint laser fire. Not a single shot missed, but the disease-wracked corpses still took several direct hits to put down for good.

  The soldiers stood around the bodies after the killing was done. It was Kathur Reclamation protocol to speak short prayers for each of the fallen when time allowed. Captain Thade ordered his men on without a word. Time was not on their side.

  The squad moved through a series of smaller chambers, each one a mosaic-rich tribute to Saint Kathur’s deeds, paid for by hundreds of generations of pilgrims. Progress was fast until the squad’s eleventh man, wheezing as he leaned upon an aquila-topped black staff, rasped the captain’s name.

  Thade halted. ‘Make this good, Seth.’

  ‘I hear someone calling. Crying out, as if from a great distance.’ The sanctioned psyker wiped a fleck of foamy spittle from his lips with a trembling hand. His powers were erratic at the best of times, waxing and waning without his control. This campaign was a nightmare – Kathur was wreathed thick in warp disruption, and the psychic toll on the Imperial Guard’s telepaths was immense. Five had died of embolisms in the weeks since planetfall, one of heart rupture, and
a further two had fallen under possession by nameless horrors born of the warp.

  ‘Calling out to us?’ Thade asked.

  ‘I… I cannot tell. There is something ahead.’ Here Seth paused to suck air through his teeth. ‘Something powerful. Something old.’

  ‘Primary threat?’ asked Janden. This was greeted by a short wave of chuckles from the gathered soldiers and Thade shaking his head. ‘Not likely,’ he said.

  The captain resisted the urge to sneer at the wheezing, thin-limbed psyker. Their eyes met and the gaze held for several moments. The captain’s eyes were the typical pale violet of the Cadian-born, while Seth’s were a deep blue, bloodshot under the band of metal across his brow that sank cables into his brain to amplify his unreliable talents. ‘Anything more specific?’ Thade tried to keep the dislike out of his voice and his expression. He was almost successful.

  ‘An agent of the Archenemy.’

  ‘In the next chamber?’

  ‘In one of the chambers ahead. I cannot be sure. The warp clouds everything.’

  Thade nodded, inclining his head and leading the squad on. ‘Janden, what chambers are ahead?’

  The vox-officer consulted his data-slate, tapping a few buttons. ‘A series of purification halls. Pilgrims used them to bathe before being allowed entrance to the inner temple.’

  ‘A bath house? In a cathedral?’ Zailen, the squad’s weapons specialist, walked alongside Janden. The hum of his live plasma gun set the troopers’ teeth on edge. Thade felt his scalp prickling, but fought down the sensation as he spoke.

  It was Thade who answered. ‘Saint Kathur, Emperor rest his bones, was famed for his purity. It makes sense those who came to see his remains would be required to ritually cleanse themselves.’

  Zailen shrugged and looked away – a habit of his when he didn’t have the words to answer.

  Ahead of them, the great double doors leading into the purification chambers stood closed. Defiled engravings of female angels, carved of marble now stained with blood and body matter, stared down at the eleven men. Thade cleared his throat.

  ‘Trooper Zailen?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Open the doors.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Zailen raised his plasma gun and squeezed the first trigger. The baseline hum of the arcane weapon intensified in an angry whine of massing energy. He breathed a quiet ‘Knock, knock…’ and pressed the second trigger.

  The plasma gun roared.

  Chapter III

  Count the Seven

  The Shrine of the Emperor’s Unending Majesty

  Second Lieutenant Taan Darrick was having a bad day.

  There were two reasons for this. The first and least important was more of a wearying ache than a real worry – the 88th were mechanised infantry, and by the Emperor did Darrick hate having to walk everywhere. This monastery assault took a lot of foot-slogging, and while his fitness wasn’t an issue it still irritated him that the regiment had been selected for this operation. Reinforce the idiotic Janusians on their vainglorious thrust into enemy territory? The fools had paid for it now. Sit in a damn church and hold out for reinforcements? Ugh. It hardly screamed ‘mechanised infantry’ to Darrick.

  The captain, as the captain always did, took the orders without a complaint and made the best of a bad deal. But Darrick? Darrick was a complainer and damn proud of it. He felt it gave him character in the stoic ranks of his fellows. It simply didn’t occur to him that he was just being annoying.

  The second reason for his bad day, and much more of a real problem, was the fact he was being shot at. Darrick’s squad had met serious secondary resistance as they neared the top of the massive bell tower. On Kathur, ‘secondary resistance’ meant the enemy had guns, too.

  Crouched behind a wooden podium once used by priests to lead choir singers, Darrick reloaded his lasgun, slapping a fresh power cell into the standard-issue weapon with a professional shove. A las-round scorched a black streak through the pulpit a hand’s span from his left ear.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a little heavy support?’ he asked the soldier sharing his pathetic cover. The other Cadian grunted agreement as he fired around the podium. He was new to the squad, and found Darrick’s endless banter distracting, not endearing. He was hardly alone in this opinion.

  The enemy, ragged elements of the Kathur PDF picking through the bones of the monastery in disorganised packs, had entered the ancient chorus room at the same time as Darrick’s men. A series of these same chorus chambers nestled atop each of the four huge spires rising from the monastery. The towers were crucial, both as a likely haven for Janusian survivors, and as the only decent sites Imperial forces could effect a supply landing for any regiment bottled in here for longer than they should be.

  ‘I’m good with a heavy bolter, you know,’ Darrick was opining to his captive audience now, and his squad shared grim smiles. The lieutenant’s declarations were punctuated by enemy fire cracking and pinging off the stone all around him. ‘And I enjoy it. The kick of actually being able to shoot your damn enemies without all this messing around, being denied any toys in case we mess up the architecture.’

  One of his men, Tomarin, grinned at Darrick’s observations. ‘It’s a shame to be denied one’s passions, sir.’

  ‘That it is. That it is. Now, time to ruin some assholes’ days.’

  Darrick’s rifle bucked in his hands with each shot, and each shot was a kill. You didn’t train every day of your life from the age of six and miss too often. The second lieutenant had been firing the same rifle for thirty years, and while most junior officers withdrew more advanced arms from the officers’ arsenal upon achieving promotion, Darrick liked to stick with what he knew best. His one guilty pleasure was his never-ending supply of various grenades – but they were in his storage bag back at the base. Along with heavy bolters and other support weapons of any significance, it was hard to justify taking grenades into a monastery when Kathur Reclamation objectives clearly stated the architecture of the shrineworld was to remain ‘undamaged by reckless interference’.

  Denied his favourite toys, Darrick scowled as he gunned down the unarmoured soldiers of the Planetary Defence Force. When the soldier next to him fell back with a hole in his head, Darrick had to concede that some of the Chaos-tainted scum over there were truly wicked shots. He broke cover to crack off three more rounds, killing two PDF soldiers and taking another in the belly. That one would take a while to die, thrashing around on the marble floor and turning his blue uniform red.

  Counts as a kill shot, he thought, smirking as he reloaded again.

  Darrick tapped the little pearl-like vox-unit in his ear. There was a rat’s chance in the Great Eye he’d be able to make a break for his vox-officer, Tellic, who was pinned down across the room with most of the others in Darrick’s squad. Las-fire flashed through the chamber in lethal strobes.

  Range on the micro-bead vox was awful at best, especially when the stone walls played all hell with the signals, but Darrick pressed the throat mic against his skin and trusted his luck.

  ‘Alliance to Venator.’

  Nothing. Not even static. Tremendous. Really, just delightful.

  Darrick’s luck was dry, and so was his patience. A quick kiss of the aquila necklace he wore, and the lieutenant broke into a crouching sprint away from the altar he’d been hiding behind. Las-fire slashed past close enough to warm his skin, but either the Emperor chose that second to bless him with fortune, or the Chaos-tainted scum who could actually hit anything were busy shooting elsewhere. Whichever was true, Darrick leapt behind the paltry cover of a row of pews, kissed his necklace again, and came up firing on full-auto.

  The tower-top choir chamber with its high domed ceiling and rows of pews now played host to a tune far removed from Imperial litanies and hymns. Lasgun cracks formed an incessant chorus to the infrequent percuss
ion of heavy bolters hammering out their high-calibre rage. Explosive shells from these smashed into the white marble walls and detonated, leaving head-sized chunks of stone blasted free. Rubble rained on the Cadians from behind their makeshift cover.

  ‘How come they get to shoot the place up?’ groaned one of the Guardsmen to his lieutenant, sharing the pathetic and disintegrating cover.

  ‘Because,’ Darrick faked a thoughtful expression, ‘it’s more fun this way.’ Those words spoken, he rose, rifle in hand.

  Darrick fired the last shot in his power cell right into the open mouth of a shouting PDF sergeant, and ducked back under cover. With a silent prayer to the Emperor as he tapped his micro-bead, he repeated the words he was getting bloody sick of repeating.

  ‘Alliance to Venator.’

  ‘Venator,’ Thade said, ‘acknowledged.’

  As he spoke, he fired his bolt pistol into the face of a young plague victim, doubtless a pilgrim or an acolyte of the cathedral. Now faceless, the child collapsed. The captain stamped on its throat to make sure it wasn’t getting back up, wincing as the spine gave way.

  ‘Talk to me, Alliance.’ He glanced around the pillared chamber, which was swarming with third-class threats staggering this way and that, uttering howls and piteous little whines. More were coming through the great double doors at the end of the hall. ‘Faster, Darrick, faster.’

  ‘…resistance in force. In full force. Secondary targets, no fewer… seventy, reinforced… auxiliary passages in the towers… heavy bolters at the… my grenades, do you hear me? Captain? Captain! The Remnant is…’

  Thade held a hand to his own micro-bead as he fell back, trying to insulate it so he could hear Darrick over the bark of the bolt pistol. Weighty standard-issue boots found awkward purchase on the blood-slick marble floor.

  According to the maps, this was the penultimate preparatory hall before the first of the primary altar chambers. For thousands of years, pilgrims had come here to be blessed by clergy before being allowed barefoot into the presence of the great altars raised in Saint Kathur’s honour. Now it looked like an abattoir, smelled like a plague pit and sounded like the Emperor-damned invasion of Cadia itself: all gunfire and screams.