Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  ‘I copy,’ Thade said, holstering his bolt pistol and drawing his chainsword. He cleaved the head of the closest plague victim from its shoulders, and kicked the headless corpse back into two of its advancing fellows. ‘Acknowledged. Remnant sighted in the bell towers by Alliance. Darrick, do you need Cruor?’

  ‘…would be lovely, captain.’

  ‘Copy that.’ Thade killed the link and gripped his chainsword two-handed. Las-fire flashed past him, scything down the walking corpses in waves, but there were too many. They streamed at the Cadians in a relentless tide, screaming, howling and sobbing.

  ‘Bayonets and blades,’ Thade called, ‘for Cadia and the Emperor!’

  At the mention of the God-Emperor, the dead wailed as if through one voice. The Cadians locked ranks and answered with silence, awaiting the foe to reach stabbing range.

  Seth gripped his staff, wheezing wetly as he stood by the captain’s shoulder. It was he who broke the quiet.

  ‘The warp is within them all. They have turned from His light.’

  Thade powered his chainsword to full throttle. ‘Then we will illuminate them.’

  The staggering tide met the dispersed, outnumbered Guard squad in a roar of noise, and the soldiers set about tearing the plague victims to pieces. Bayonets knifed out to punch into eye sockets and laspistols flared at point-blank range. In the centre of the preparation chamber, Thade hewed left and right, his chainsword rising and falling in skill-less rhythm, spraying blood in all directions as it ravaged flesh. Cold droplets flecked his face, joining the sweat stinging his eyes. He’d always fancied himself a fair swordsman, but aptitude played no part in this eye-to-eye slaughter. In a scene where there was no room to manoeuvre, against an enemy that never defended themselves, all the skill in the world meant nothing. Moments like this came down to defiance; sheer, gruelling endurance.

  A year ago the room had been devoted to purification. As Thade moved from corpse to corpse, scything them down in a relentless repetition of motion, he could scarcely believe this place had ever been anything but a slaughterhouse.

  He cut left, lopping the head off an obese plague victim, and unleashed three bolts into the wretches staggering behind it.

  ‘I hate this planet,’ he said for what may have been the fiftieth time that week. ‘Janden, look alive! Behind you!’

  Janden’s heavy vox-caster backpack made him a slow target compared to the others in the command squad. Stumbling over a body on the floor, the vox-officer went down as he turned to face the plague victims reaching for him. A white shock of pain flared through his skull as his head hit the ground with a meaty smack. Hands mobbed him, grabbing and tearing, none of which he noticed.

  Dazed and barely conscious, Janden didn’t realise the dull throb in his leg was because one of the plague-dead had wrenched off his shin armour and was devouring his right calf. The others seemed intent on battering him to death with their rotting fists, though Janden was so out of it he didn’t feel much of that either. A shadow fell across his numb, unseeing face. A dead man was leering at him, a sick visage of shrunken eyes and black gums.

  The grinding blade of Thade’s chainsword burst through the chest of the corpse. With precise strikes and a few ungentle kicks, the captain cleared the walking dead away from Janden.

  Five more came on with their characteristic shamble, reaching out for him. Each wore the soiled once-bright robes of Kathurite clergy.

  ‘Eighty-Eight!’ Thade cried, and threw himself to the ground. A storm of covering las-fire flashed over his head.

  When it was done, the five plague-slain were holed and twitching on the ground, going nowhere. Thade dragged the delirious, bleeding vox-officer behind a pillar and sat him up.

  Janden’s helmet slapped against the stone behind his head. Blood gushed from the bite wound in his leg, which Thade bound with a hasty tourniquet.

  ‘Pressure, Janden. You hear me? Keep pressure on this.’

  ‘Captain,’ Janden’s eyes rolled back. ‘There’s blood. Blood on your medal.’

  Thade’s hand went instinctively to the Ward of Cadia on the front of his helmet. His gloved fingertips streaked even more dark gore across its silver surface.

  ‘Captain…’ Janden nodded like a drunk, looking over Thade’s shoulder. ‘Behind…’

  The chainsword was in Thade’s hands, revving up as he rose and turned. The teeth, each sharpened to a monomolecular edge, met the shoulder of an elderly plague victim in the filthy robes of a senior monk. The sword’s teeth chewed down into the corpse with noisy efficiency. The holy man, dead for five months, screamed as Thade sawed him in two. Old, cold blood hit both Cadians in an icy shower.

  Even through the burning in his muscles, even through fear-heightened senses and the adrenaline fuelling his instincts, Thade was annoyed enough to curse at getting sprayed again.

  More corpses ran towards him, only to be cut down by precise swings of his chainsword and pinpoint fire from Janden’s laspistol.

  ‘I need a signal to base.’ Thade’s sword dripped blood as it idled once more, and the captain turned to the wounded soldier. Janden was pale, sweating and bleeding from a score of wounds, but he nodded to Thade while reloading his pistol.

  ‘Contact, sir?’

  ‘Direct message to Colonel Lockwood. Demand immediate deployment of Strike Team Cruor. Authorisation: Thade thirty sixty-two-A. Cruor are to assist Lieutenant Darrick in taking objectives three through six. The bell towers. Alliance is losing the bell towers. Make sure the colonel realises that.’

  Janden left his laspistol on his knees as he punched in the code and voxed back to base. Thade was already moving away, running back to the heart of the chamber where his men were fighting their brutal melee. As he ran, he messaged Darrick to tell of Cruor’s impending arrival.

  Alliance had lost the bell towers.

  Darrick never saw the wall explode, and never saw half of his squad blown out of the gaping hole. As the detonation went off and threw him aside, he was knocked momentarily unconscious.

  He did, however, recover fast. Sharp senses and a thick skull meant he came to in a hurry and heard the cries as the soldiers still alive began their long fall. Even over ringing in his ears in the aftermath of the missile blast, he heard them falling to their deaths.

  ‘Alliance, come in.’ Thade’s voice crackled over the micro-bead. Darrick dragged himself, bleeding and battered, from under a pile of wrecked and smouldering pews. He reached a trembling hand to tap the earpiece.

  ‘Alliance,’ Darrick hissed through gritted teeth. ‘Broken.’

  ‘Repeat,’ Thade said. The signal was bad. Interference from the explosion that had raged through the choir chamber and destroyed a whole wall? Probably.

  ‘I am having absolutely no fun today,’ Darrick hissed, pulling out a chunk of shrapnel from his thigh. He looked up from where he lay. His men – those that still lived – were rousing. Too experienced to rise fully and face enemy fire, they crawled through the shredded furniture, finding cover wherever they could. Las-fire was already flashing at them from the Kathurite positions across the chamber.

  ‘This is Alliance, captain.’ Darrick reached out bleeding fingers to pull his fallen lasgun closer. He’d carried that weapon since he’d been a Whiteshield over twenty years ago. Not a chance in hell he’d leave it here, no matter how battered it was. His fingertips snagged the strap, and he dragged on it. The rifle bore a palette of fresh burns and new scratches, but otherwise looked fine. He guessed it would still fire. ‘Alliance: Broken,’ he repeated.

  ‘Acknowledged. Cruor inbound. Hold in the name of the Emperor,’ was Thade’s curt reply before cutting the link.

  Easier said than done, thought Darrick.

  A gang-ramp slammed closed. Thrusters fired. A machine came to life, taking its cargo into the sky on screaming engines.

  The Valkyrie tore through
the air over the city. Its downswept wings carried racks of air-to-surface missiles the pilots could never fire, and the twin autocannons on the gunship’s cheeks remained silent even as the Valkyrie flew over tertiary threat targets already beginning to flood the streets cleared by the Guard earlier in the day. The cannons’ silence was not to save ammunition or, as in the case of the rockets, to prevent damage to the planet’s sacred architecture. At this speed, there was simply no way the pilots could expect to hit anything. Dead bodies wept at the sight of the troop transport as it shot overhead, en route to the Shrine of the Emperor’s Unending Majesty. The Valkyrie, crow-black and dragon-loud, roared onward.

  On one side of the cockpit, which arched down like a sneering vulture’s face at the cityscape flashing below, were two words in Imperial Gothic lettering. The name of the gunship itself: His Holy Blade.

  On the opposite side was a simple word in High Gothic. The name of the gunship’s cargo: Cruor.

  As the 88th hunted within, Enginseer Osiron remained outside the monastery with the thirty Chimeras.

  He was not alone, of course. The drivers, armed and ready, stood by their vehicles. A handful busied themselves with minor maintenance on engines or armour plating. Between the orderly rows of Chimeras, lobotomised tech-servitors moved here and there, using their augmetic hands and machine tool limbs to aid in the repairs. One of the servitors – formerly a deserter, now a half-machine slave without a mind – had its forearms replaced with industrial scrubbers. It crouched by the command Chimera, its whirring hands scrubbing and flushing out gore from the tank’s treads. Another servitor with a hammer for a left hand panel-beat another tank’s distorted front armour back into Standard Construct regulation shape.

  Dead Man’s Hand stalked around the parked troop transports, their steps making a rhythmic drumbeat of blessed iron on stone. Perimeter defence duty.

  Wreathed in a cloak of blood red, the hood pulled over his head and hiding his features, Enginseer Osiron nodded silently to one of the patrolling Sentinels as it passed. Vertain replied to the tech-priest’s nod with an acknowledgement blip over the vox.

  None of the 88th knew Osiron’s age. He could have been thirty or two hundred and thirty. His face was forever concealed by the low-hanging crimson hood and a surgically attached rebreather mask covering his nose, mouth and chin. The only visible human features beyond the pale skin of his cheeks were his eyes of Cadian violet, glinting in the depths of the hood’s shadow.

  His body – what there was to see of it beneath the traditional robe of the Machine Cult of Mars – was an armoured form of tarnished plating, whirring gears and hissing pistons. Ostensibly he was human, at least at the most basic level: two arms, two legs, and so on.

  But everything visible was replaced or augmented with the holy alterations of his cult. His internal organs ticked and clicked loud enough to hear. His joints hummed as gears simulated bones moving in harmony. His voice was a toneless murmur emitted from the vox-speakers on the front of his rebreather. This last aspect betrayed his curious inhumanity most of all, turning every breath into an audible rise and fall of static. Krsssh, in. Krsssh, out.

  Osiron leaned on the haft of his massive two-handed axe. The weapon was too heavy for an unaugmented man to lift, and sported the split-skull image of the Adeptus Mechanicus on its black iron blade. From a bulky backpack that thrummed with power, a multi-jointed mechanical arm rose and extended out, its clawed hand opening and closing as if stretching. A cutting torch on the arm’s wrist flared briefly as the power claw whirred closed. Drill bits and other tools folded back into the arm’s body. It coiled behind the tech-priest’s shoulder, reposed.

  ‘Count the Seven,’ Osiron’s internal vox said directly into his left ear. It had been doing that for an hour now and, unlike the squads engaged in the retaking of the monastery, Osiron had disobeyed orders, remaining tapped into the compromised frequency. It fascinated him.

  ‘Curious,’ he said in a murmur of vox-speakers. The servitor next to him turned slowly, unsure if it had misheard an order. Osiron tapped a button on the signum attached to his belt, hanging down his thigh like a metal pouch decorated with a hundred keys to press. The servitor cancelled its attention cycle, going back to staring mutely ahead, as dead in its own way as the poor wretches still staggering across this planet.

  ‘Osiron to Vertain.’

  ‘Honoured enginseer?’

  ‘Monitor auspex for signs of jamming.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sir. The title always made Osiron smile. He held some minor authority in the 88th by dint of expertise, his ruthlessly logical mind and his close friendship with the captain – not from any formal rank.

  ‘I’m not seeing evidence of jamming,’ Vertain voxed back. ‘Confirmed by the rest of my team. Dead Man’s Hand reports no instrument glitches.’

  ‘That, scout-lieutenant, is exactly my point. When have our scanners been so clear?’

  ‘Maybe we’re just lucky.’ Osiron was no expert at interpreting human emotion through tone of voice, but Vertain’s doubts were obvious as he spoke. He didn’t believe what he’d suggested. Neither did Osiron.

  ‘Unlikely. Auspex has been clear for over an hour. I detect none of the interference we have come to associate as standard for Kathur Reclamation operations.’

  ‘Acknowledged, honoured enginseer. I’ve already logged the clarity of auspex readings with High Command. Can you reach the captain?’

  ‘A moment, please. Suspicions must be confirmed before the captain is alerted. Osiron to inbound Valkyrie His Holy Blade.’

  The reply took several seconds. When it came, it hit in a mangled wave of savaged vox. Just noise.

  ‘Enginseer Bylam Osiron to inbound Valkyrie His Holy Blade.’ The tech-priest adjusted his internal vox by tweaking dials on his forearm.

  ‘His Holy Blade. Two minutes until arrival,’ the pilot said. ‘Problems?’

  ‘Count the Seven,’ Osiron’s vox whispered again. ‘Count the Seven.’

  The enginseer frowned. ‘Pilot, report auspex performance as you enter standard close-range scanning distance relative to our position.’

  It was an unusual request. Osiron waited patiently for the pilot to check his instruments. ‘Standard distortion at medium range, sir. Reaching close range in twenty seconds.’

  Osiron timed the estimate against the ticking of his own heart-engine. Twenty-three seconds passed.

  ‘Auspex is… clear. Minimal interference.’

  Osiron killed the link and switched channels. ‘Scout-lieutenant.’

  ‘Yes, honoured enginseer?’

  ‘Deploy available resources in defensive spread.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because you are the ranking officer here, and we have walked into a trap.’

  The double doors were steel-shod Kathurite oak and had stood for three thousand years; consistently blessed, reinforced, redecorated and restored over the centuries. They were built in the same style as most of Kathur’s savagely overdone architecture, but practicality was in their construction, too. In the event of a fire, these doors would seal closed and allow those within the preparation chambers to survive up to nine hours protected from the flames.

  The ornate doors exploded inwards under the force of the plasma blast. With twin crashes, they flew off their hinges and clattered to the red carpet blanketing the floor. Eleven men stood in the torn opening, rifles and pistols raised. It was the third set of such doors Zailen had opened with his plasma gun. White steam, hot enough to scald flesh, hissed from the weapon’s focusing ring in an angry gush.

  Another preparation chamber opened up before them. Another hall filled with the enraged dead. The corpses turned their attention to the living interlopers, their ruined faces peeling into expressions resembling something like joy, and something like pain. Several began to wail.

  Thade’s swo
rd cut the air and his squad opened fire.

  After the mayhem, the squad reformed in the centre of the room. Blood marked them as surely as if they’d been painted with it. Their bootsteps echoed throughout the chamber, bouncing off walls that sported stone angels leering down in cold dissatisfaction. The reliefs in this room depicted scenes of the Great Crusade. Winged Astartes warriors standing tall and proud – a testament to the Raven Guard Legion that had forced this world into compliance so many thousands of years ago.

  Another set of double doors barred their way into the next chamber. Thade shook his head.

  ‘We’re being herded. Like cattle to the slaughter.’

  The Cadians nodded. Zailen said, ‘Room after room of piss-poor resistance. They’re wearing us down piece by piece.’ Several of the soldiers checked their digital ammo readouts and muttered agreement.

  ‘Seth?’ Thade fixed him with his violet glare. ‘We’re running out of preparation chambers. This is the heart of the monastery. Whatever you’ve sensed is nearby.’

  The psyker was trembling. Dark blood leaked in a viscous trail from his right eye. Thade considered shooting him on the spot. Seth’s unreliability today was a little much even for the captain’s patience. He knew a commissar would almost certainly have executed the shivering man by now, for dereliction of duty as well as the risk of psychic contamination. But Thade needed every advantage he could grasp.

  Everything about this mission was a mess, right back to the fools in the Janus 6th who’d tried to take the shrine in the first place. Could the monastery be held? Maybe. Could it be held without extreme losses? Not a chance. Could some amateur outfit like the Janus 6th – just thrown out into space by their founding world – have any chance to cut it here? Never.

  Thade had hoped to secure the key points with his divided teams and seal themselves in, awaiting reinforcement. A good plan, but getting more unrealistic by the second. Everything fairly reeked of deception and an enemy’s pre-planning.