Execution - Rachel Harrison Read online

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘In that moment he was more afraid of me than he was of the sin-thieves.’

  Raine leads the Antari to level twelve of the bastion. It’s not the top level, where the mounted gun itself sits, it’s a few floors below, protected by double-thick walls and a unit of well-armoured and well-armed rebel soldiers. Once Raine and her Antari have killed their way through and breached the chamber, they see why.

  ‘Golden Throne,’ says Crys. ‘What have they done?’

  The huge, square chamber is the munitions store for the wall-mounted guns, and the armoury for every rebel soldier on this section of the walls. Belts of shells shine with a dull gleam. Demo charges and mines are crated and boxed. There are missiles and promethium canisters. Rockets and grenades. Every single one of them has been marked with that baleful eye, painted on or scratched into the metal. There is another painted on the floor in the centre of the room. From the smell, Raine thinks probably in blood.

  ‘I need you to detonate it,’ Raine says. ‘All of it.’

  Crys nods once, her jaw set.

  ‘With pleasure,’ she says, then glances over. ‘You mean remotely, right, sir?’

  Raine doesn’t break eye contact. She has considered both options. She has considered all of the options.

  ‘If you can.’

  Crys lets out a long breath.

  ‘I can rig it,’ she says.

  ‘How long do you need?’ Raine asks.

  Crys looks around at the heaped munitions. She rubs absently at the ruin of her left ear.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ she says. ‘Give or take.’

  ‘You’ll have it,’ Raine says. ‘Just concentrate on rigging the explosives, and get the Hartkin and the Mistvypers on the vox. Make sure they’re doing the same. Walk them through it if you need to.’

  Crys nods, already pulling what’s left of her kit out of her bag.

  ‘Sir?’ The call comes from by the door. It’s Andren. ‘We have company incoming.’

  Raine doesn’t need telling. She can already hear the thunder of feet, the bellowed blasphemies and all the while underneath that booming voice.

  The Imperium of Man is dead.

  Not today, thinks Severina Raine.

  She draws her pistol in one smooth action, even with her shattered arm bound loosely to her chest.

  Not ever.

  Raine ducks back behind the door of the arming chamber as solid shot rounds impact the wall beside her head. They are keeping the Drastians out, but it gets more difficult with every passing second.

  ‘Crys!’ she shouts.

  ‘Almost there,’ the combat engineer yells in reply.

  Opposite Raine, Ekar Wain takes a solid round to the face. It shatters the storm trooper’s mask, and he slumps sideways. Three more rounds punch into him, torso and legs, before his squad can drag him back into cover. He leaves a dark smear of blood on the stone.

  ‘Mists take them,’ Andren snarls.

  He leans around the doorframe and fires twice. Two dead rebels. More push their bodies aside and take their place.

  ‘Commissar,’ Zane calls out.

  Raine moves over to her, keeping low. The psyker has her eyes closed and her hands curled. Blood runs sluggishly from her nose as she projects a kine-shield around Yulia Crys.

  ‘What is it?’

  Zane frowns more deeply.

  ‘The three bastions,’ she says in a low voice. ‘The fire that we make of them. I try to look further, but it is the last thing I see.’

  She opens her eyes, just barely.

  ‘I can smell it. Hear it. I see nothing but fire.’

  Zane’s mouth quirks up in a pained smile as she looks at Raine.

  ‘But I do not need to tell you this,’ she says. ‘Do I?’

  Raine meets Zane’s eyes. She lets out a long, slow breath. She has, after all, considered all of the options.

  ‘You know what must be done,’ she says. ‘Duty comes first.’

  There’s a flicker in Zane’s expression. A momentary tremor. Then she laughs, a hollow sound.

  ‘That it does,’ she replies. ‘In all things.’

  ‘Done,’ shouts Crys. ‘It’s done!’

  ‘Cover me,’ Raine shouts, before running across the room to Crys. She feels the kine-shield envelop her, a distinct winter chill.

  ‘It’ll go remotely, as you asked,’ Crys says. She’s wound her two demolition charges in parchment from her kit. Each strip is marked with prayers in her spiked handwriting. ‘The range is enough for us to make it back outside the walls. Odi and Selk had their teams do the same.’

  There’s a solid boom from the stairwell outside. Raine hears Andren curse.

  ‘All squads,’ Raine says, over the open channel. ‘Do not detonate until I give the order. They must all go at once, or this will have been for nothing. Is that clear?’

  ‘Understood,’ says Odi.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ says Selk.

  Crys’ gaze slides to the door, to where the fighting is still thick and furious. She closes her grey eyes for a second and mutters a prayer. It’s in Antari, but Raine knows it.

  May He be with us as we live and die, it goes. For it is not ours to question why.

  Then she sets the charges.

  ‘We came out of the passage inside the nest. It filled the storeroom, wall to wall. Made of parchment and filth and bones. Human bones. Small ones that broke underfoot.’

  Raine pauses and drains the last of her tea. Even after such a long time, thinking of those bones still sends a chill up her spine.

  ‘Bayti cried out,’ she says. ‘It was the bones that did it. The vermin heard him and came hissing and baring their fangs.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Bayti panicked and threw his torch hard and high into the centre of it. Lem followed suit. The vermin started to scatter. I could see that we wouldn’t catch them all, that some would pass us and escape.’

  She keeps her eyes on the distant fortress as she speaks.

  ‘I threw my torch behind us, setting everything around the entrance alight. It caught so quickly, all that parchment and oil and filth. The vermin were mewling. Bayti was screaming. I grabbed him, and Lem, and pulled them down into the shallow water at our feet.’

  Raine remembers the black water, gritty and vile in her mouth. The vermin, scrabbling around and over them, all aflame. Bayti, thrashing and getting to his knees even as Lem tried in vain to keep him under the water.

  Screaming. Fire. Smoke.

  ‘There was a huge rush of heat and light. I closed my eyes and I prayed.’

  She lets out a slow breath.

  ‘When I opened them again, I had been dragged clear of the storeroom and into the tunnel. The door was open, broken from the hinges. Drill-abbot Ifyn was there. He had been all along, I suppose.’

  ‘What about Lem,’ Andren says. ‘And Bayti?’

  ‘He told me that Bayti died trying to run. That Lem died trying to save him. He said that their choices had cost them, as all choices do. I interrupted him then, for the first and last time. I told him that I had made Bayti crawl through the hole. That I had thrown the torch and cut off our own escape to ensure our success. That surely their deaths were in part due to me.’

  She remembers the way Ifyn had looked at her then. Pitiless but patient.

  ‘What did he say?’ Andren asks.

  ‘That I was right. That my choices also had a cost.’

  She finally looks at Andren.

  ‘And that my purpose was to bear it.’

  Fighting out of the bastion is bloody work. They lose the youngest of the Wyldfolk, Ludi, to a tripwire set by the Drastians. It happens so quickly that Raine is dazzled by the burst of flame. No time to blink. Those closest are cut by stone chips and bits of bone. There is no time to
stop either. They keep running instead, the sound of their ragged breathing echoing off the walls as they descend the stairs. Raine can feel the adrenaline wearing off. The skin of her injured arm feels tight under her greatcoat and she’s lost all the movement in her wrist.

  When they reach the foot of the steps, the vox crackles in her ear.

  ‘Hartkin are out and free,’ says Odi. ‘Who is quickest now, Wyck?’

  Daven Wyck spits blood on the floor. His nose is badly broken from where the bullgryn hit him. It’s changed the shape of his face, making it better match the ugliness he carries with him.

  ‘Mists take you, Odi,’ he says. ‘Trust you to win at running away.’

  The words that come back are Antari, and clearly colourful. Raine doesn’t even know all of them.

  ‘Cut the chatter,’ she says. ‘Odi, hole up and wait to trigger on my command.’

  They get clear of the bottom of the tower, and make for the breach point in the wall.

  ‘Just how big are we expecting this explosion to be?’ Wyck says as he runs.

  Crys glances backwards, her eyes wide.

  ‘If I reckon right, it’ll do more than just quiet those guns,’ she says. ‘It’ll bring the whole bloody bastion down.’

  Andren Fel slows pace, just barely. He looks at the bastions, then at Raine. She sees herself reflected in his eye lenses. Painted in red from the glass and from the blood on her face. Her own and theirs.

  ‘Not just the bastion,’ he says. ‘It’s the whole thing. We’re collapsing the nest.’

  Raine doesn’t get a chance to answer. She is interrupted by a loud crack. A solid shell hits Andren in the shoulder, right between his armour plates. The other two Duskhounds, Tyl and Jeth, return fire as their captain stumbles. Watching Andren Fel bleed, Raine feels something she can’t afford. Something she has no time to feel. The first shot is just the edge of the coming storm. More follow as a noise grows that threatens to drown out even the booming voice. It’s the sound of boots on stone. The Antari fire back, but it’s like spitting into the wind. Together, they fall back into the shadow of the tower as the might of the Drastian forces spills out of the central keep.

  ‘Commissar,’ the vox crackles. It’s Odi. ‘They are coming. We cannot stay here.’

  Raine fires her pistol at the oncoming rebels until the clip runs dry. Most of her shots miss. She’s struggling to keep the gun steady. To see. The rebels seem to smear like ink.

  The Imperium of Man is dead, says the voice.

  ‘All squads,’ she says. ‘Detonate, now.’

  Crys looks at her.

  ‘Now!’ Raine cries.

  She hears two acknowledgement clicks over the vox from Odi and Selk.

  Crys thumbs the detonator.

  ‘Zane!’ Raine shouts.

  The Imperium of Man is–

  The words are stolen as the towers detonate in almost perfect synchronicity. The sky becomes fire as three colossal explosions reach upwards and join, curving on the inside face of the void shield. The pressure wave is repelled by the shield, and every ounce of force is directed back down at the fortress. At the towers. At the Drastian rebels.

  At Severina Raine and her Antari soldiers.

  The rebels out in the open are silenced. They fall to the ground, dead. Their lungs burst. Their eyes bleed. They are turned to black dust by incredible heat under pressure. Masonry and twisted metal rains to the earth. The great grey shape of the unbreakable fortress of Morne shifts. Cracks.

  Then, with a thunderous boom, it breaks.

  It’s like the Time of Ending, Raine thinks, as she and her Antari soldiers watch the fortress die from their knees, through Lydia Zane’s kine-shield. The psyker is screaming, lightning arcing across her limbs and from her eyes. None of them can touch her. Her shield is crazed with cracks. Even as the world stops ending, Zane keeps screaming until the cables that crown her flare with light, and she collapses. Her kine-shield collapses with her. Gentle curls of smoke drift from the ruin of her eyes. Raine puts her fingers to Zane’s throat, and the psyker stirs.

  ‘It is the last thing I see,’ she says, before falling unconscious.

  Around them, the fortress caves inwards, momentous and slow, burying anyone still left inside. Scraps of the tattered banner float to earth, still burning. The baleful eye, consumed by fire.

  ‘Spared,’ Andren says, barely audible over the ringing in Raine’s ears. ‘By Him, and by her.’

  Raine nods. It makes her vision swim. The psyker had saved them, just as Raine knew she would, and she had paid for it with her grey Antari eyes. It isn’t the only price paid. The vox-link to the Mistvypers returns only static, and when Raine gets through to Odi, he barely acknowledges. Before the link is cut, she hears the sergeant of the Hartkin mumbling the Antari words for the dead. The sound of it will stay with her, always.

  With the fortress broken, the clouds choose that moment to break too. Drops begin to fall, cold against Raine’s skin. The Antari stir around her, dazed and shell-shocked. Andren unfastens his mask and pulls it off. His dark hair is matted to his head. Blood pinks his teeth.

  ‘The armour was never coming,’ he says. ‘Was it?’

  Raine keeps looking at him, right in those grey eyes.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘You kept it from us,’ he says. ‘The truth of it.’

  Raine nods. She had known before she’d led the charge. Before she had executed Tevar Lun. Before sharing stories with Andren on the ridge. She had also known that the fortress could be broken without the armour as long as she kept them strong. As long as they did not falter. So she had made a choice to keep it from them.

  That choice, like the cost of it, is hers to bear.

  ‘I did,’ she says. ‘As is my right, captain.’

  Andren looks as if he might say something else, but then he blinks. Straightens his shoulders. It’s as though he remembers himself. Where he is. What she is. He bows his head.

  ‘As is your right, of course,’ he says. ‘Commissar.’

  Raine gets to her feet. Her limbs don’t feel like her own. Blood gums her eyelashes. Her ears ring and her head aches. Around her, the Antari start to rise. Those that can. They lean on one another, breathing ragged. She turns to them and draws her sword with her one good arm. She can hear the distant sound of the other forces moving up. Engines and armour and boots on the ground. Hymnals, sung loud. A flight of Valkyrie gunships split the sky. Under all of that, the drum of the rain as it washes the world clean.

  ‘The Imperium of Man can never die,’ she says, her voice hoarse.

  ‘Not today,’ say the Antari.

  ‘Not ever,’ says Commissar Severina Raine.

  About the Author

  Rachel Harrison is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 short stories ‘Execution’, ‘Binding’, ‘The Third War’, ‘The Blooding’ and ‘Dishonoured’. She lives and works in Nottingham, UK

  The disgraced Vostroyan 77th face an uprising on a prison planet, not to mention the hostile attentions of their new commissar. Can they achieve victory and restore their reputation?

  A Black Library Publication

  Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Fortress illustration by Ahmed Aldoori.

  Execution © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Execution, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

&nbs
p; A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78572-825-9

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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