Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  ‘Explain yourself.’

  ‘It would be a few survivors languishing in the dark and voxing for rescue.’

  ‘I had requested aid from Cadia in the belief its units were valorous. You disappoint me, warden-captain.’

  The three Cadians fell silent. Vertain swallowed, clenching his teeth to prevent saying something he’d be executed for. Even Osiron’s mechanical breathing slowed and quieted. Thade leaned on the table, knuckles down, and faced the ageing general.

  ‘I will follow my orders to the best of my ability at all times. If the lord general of the Reclamation deems it necessary to send a fraction of my regiment into an engagement that the assigned campaign tacticians argued against, then so be it. If the lord general appoints a mechanised infantry company to lock itself within a siege situation, then I’ll do all I can to make sure those orders are carried out. But I’ve been fighting the Archenemy since my recruitment into the Cadian Youth legion at fourteen years of age. Every single man in a Cadian uniform was raised to assemble and fire a standard-issue lasgun before he could read and write. If the 88th falls back, it’s because in the considered opinion of every veteran officer among our number, we had to fall back.’

  ‘I see,’ the lord general said simply. It was almost a sneer.

  ‘I confirmed the Janusians were dead – just as I’d said they would be when their initial assault was planned. My Sentinels have remapped over half of the eastern district, updating the data readouts with post-plague geographical analysis. I’ve confirmed the presence of the XIV Traitor Legion.’

  At this point, Thade gestured with a bloodstained glove to the pict slate he’d placed on the table. Its surface display was still auto-cycling through images of the Death Guard Astartes confronted by Thade’s squad. The final three picts showed the hulking creature dead, its armour blackened from las-fire and cracked open from bolt rounds. Maggots and black organic filth had spilled from the wounds.

  ‘And my men killed several hundred Remnant as we fell back from the monastery,’ Thade finished.

  ‘They came for the vehicles,’ Osiron’s snake voice hissed mechanically. ‘They struck in a horde of plague-slain as we readied to draw back.’

  ‘We killed another three Death Guard as we fought off the Remnant and made ready to withdraw,’ Vertain added. ‘Confirmed kills, verified by the gun cameras of Dead Man’s Hand.’

  ‘By… what?’ asked Maggrig.

  ‘Sentinel Squadron C-Eighty-Eight Alpha,’ Thade said. Vertain made an apologetic salute to the general. He’d not meant to fall into regimental slang.

  Overseer Maggrig leaned back in his arch-backed wooden chair, gazing around the empty command tent with its unrolled maps hanging from the walls and his ornamental weapons on racks. His eyes fell upon Thade’s chainsword. The captain had cleaned most of the filth from it on the drive back to base, but he was keen to tend to it properly. The weapon’s spirit would balk at such disrespect soon.

  ‘That is a beautiful sword, warden-captain.’

  Thade inclined his head slightly in a look that could’ve said ‘thank you’ as easily as it said ‘what in the hells are you talking about?’ Ultimately, his voice went with the former.

  ‘My thanks, lord general.’

  ‘Where did you acquire it? You may have noticed I’m something of a collector.’

  Thade had noticed. For all his faults, the lord general had a wonderful collection of blades and pistols. The captain doubted they’d been used even once by Maggrig personally, but what surprised him was the fact each piece of the displayed collection was an admirable and apparently fully-functional weapon. No one blade stood out as purely decorative. Not one pistol did Thade recognise as ornamental. They were tools of war, from the plainest sector standard Kantrael-forged bolt pistol similar to Thade’s own, to the double-edged power sabre fit for a hive noble on Thracian Prime.

  This one aspect of the lord general was the only facet Thade warmed to in his commander’s personality. Of course, the Cadians had been joking for weeks the only way Maggrig could have acquired real weapons was to pilfer them from the corpses of men his orders had killed. But Thade doubted bringing up that little joke would crack a smile across the general’s wizened features.

  ‘I’d noticed, sir. Your collection is impressive.’

  ‘And your blade, warden-captain?’

  ‘It was a gift, lord general.’

  ‘Of course, but from whom? Dispense with the modesty. It doesn’t suit one with such silver on his helm.’

  Was this the lord general’s attempt at bonding with one of his men? Or just a deflection? Was this a friendly divergence from the conversation, knowing that Thade had been in the right? A clumsy attempt, if it was, but the captain was wrong-footed for a moment. The Overseer’s voice remained pinched between a clipped reprimand and a sneer, but the captain had quickly grown used to that.

  ‘It was a gift from Lord Castellan Creed.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maggrig smiled a honey-laden smirk. Apparently Thade’s answer clarified something in his mind, though the captain couldn’t guess what. ‘In recognition for your brave efforts during the days before your world fell to the Archenemy.’

  The Cadians stiffened for the second time. Vertain drew breath to speak but Thade cut him off with a brisk wave.

  ‘Dismissed, lieutenant,’ the captain said.

  Chafing, almost shaking in anger, the Sentinel pilot made the sign of the aquila and stalked from the tent.

  ‘Home has not fallen, lord general.’ Thade’s voice was measured and precise. ‘We fight on, even now.’

  Maggrig did so love to see the much-vaunted Cadian pride take a bruising. Superior bastards, every one of them.

  ‘I’ve seen the reports, warden-captain. Months into this new crusade, and over half the planet still in the grip of the Despoiler’s forces. A shame, truly. Rather an important world to lose like that.’

  Thade’s reply was long in coming. He took several breaths in silence, pointedly moved his hands away from his weapon belt, picked up the data-slate he’d brought in with him, and handed it to Osiron.

  Cadian blood, he kept thinking. Ice in your veins.

  ‘Am I dismissed, sir?’ he asked after almost a minute had passed.

  ‘No.’

  Thade stood impassively. ‘As you wish. Is there more you want to know?’

  ‘No. But two points remain.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ said Thade. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Firstly, you’re aware your questionable actions have earned my displeasure tonight.’

  ‘I’m aware the lord general would have liked matters to have proceeded differently.’

  ‘Exactly so. With that in mind… Tell me, the 88th makes use of a sanctioned psyker, does it not?’

  ‘I fail to see what that has to do with the situation.’

  ‘Answer me, warden-captain.’

  ‘Seth Roscrain, ident number C-Eighty-Eight X-zero-one. Awarded the Blood Star at Jago III for wounds taken in an act of self-sacrifice.’

  ‘Yes. Seth, that’s the one. Am I to understand the 88th currently lacks commissarial support to deal with a sanctioned psyker?’

  Thade smiled his crooked grin. He saw where this was going. ‘I can recite the Cadian code of law that allows any officer above the rank of lieutenant to take additional training with regards to being qualified to deal with, and execute if necessary, a sanctioned psyker. I have that training, as does every lieutenant in my command.’

  ‘All the same, this is my Reclamation and I will take no chances by relying on some Cadian loophole. You are to be appointed a commissar immediately.’

  Thade watched the old man, his violet eyes narrowed. What game was he playing?

  ‘The 88th hasn’t had a commissar in over seventeen years.’

  ‘I deem it necessary now.’ The lord general thumped
a wad of printed papers on the table. ‘One day you charge into battle when it would be more prudent to fall back. Then the next you run when you have orders to hold. Thade, Thade, Thade… You’re unreliable. It says as much in these reports. What are you trying to prove, boy? Trying to live up to that medal, eh? No, this is the right choice. It will put some steel in your spine.’

  Thade could happily have lopped the old bastard’s head clean from his shoulders at that moment. Instead, he forced himself to nod. The simple motion was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.

  ‘Ha! I see that nod cost you. I see it in your eyes. “Cadian blood, no blood more precious.” I know how you think, Thade. I know how all you Shock boys think. Let me tell you, warden-captain. We’re all equal in my task force. So you’ll take this commissarial appointment and you’ll smile. Understood?’

  Thade made the sign of the aquila again. ‘And your second point, sir?’

  The order to subject his regiment to a commissar’s appointment had more than just surprised Thade: it had been the last thing he’d seen coming. That’s why Lord General Maggrig’s next matter rocked him to his core.

  ‘Against my better judgement, your unit has been requested for a specific duty.’

  Thade raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, warden-captain. As of this moment, the 88th is seconded to His Imperial Majesty’s Holy Inquisition.’

  Chapter V

  The Ordo Sepulturum

  Aboard the Inquisitorial vessel,

  The Night Star

  Inquisitor Bastian Caius was one hundred and nineteen years old. Behind his eyes simmered a thousand unspoken secrets. Sometimes he would muse upon his role: a life spent in devotion to finding truth in the darkness, learning of creatures and heresies that the overwhelming majority of the great and glorious Imperium would never see. Three quarters of his life had been spent seeing and hearing things that, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, didn’t exist.

  While Caius was over a hundred, he looked thirty. Juvenat processes were the privilege of the Imperium’s wealthiest and most valuable servants, and the inquisitor considered himself a member of both categories. He bore more than his fair share of scars, but that was to be expected given his interrogator years had been spent apprenticed to Inquisitor Shyva Kresskien. That old hag, may her bones rest in the Emperor’s light, had always demanded the fiercest faith and fervour from her interrogator pupils. The list of her accomplishments was long indeed – one of the Ordo Xenos Scarus’s lengthiest rolls of honour, as it happened – but so was the scroll listing interrogators and agents slain in her service. The few men and women that survived her demanding apprenticeships were rightly counted among the most capable inquisitors in the sector.

  Caius himself had almost died in his former mistress’s service on several occasions. His lips were split by a permanent scar near the right edge of his mouth, taken when a heretic had come too close with a knife. His left leg from the knee down was a bionic claw, his shin wreathed in thick metal and the foot itself a four-toed talon resembling a Sentinel walker’s thudding limb.

  The most obvious modification was his eye. Caius’s left eye was an ugly augmetic, a blood-red lens fixed in a steel focusing ring surgically grafted to his face in a restructured eye socket of chrome. The implant had been costly (for the old crone always rewarded her worthy apprentices as befitted their dutiful service) but as with many bionics, the mechanical eye was all business and no artistry. The lens could detect the most subtle movement in its field of vision, even a man’s breathing, and relay it instantly to Caius’s shoulder-mounted psycannon, forming a fast and flawless targeting system. A further enhancement took the form of an attached aura-scrye scanner, forming a secondary red lens eye projecting from a bronze and steel implant attached to the inquisitor’s temple. With his sight linked between these two false eyes and his natural vision, Caius could literally see psychic emissions, translated into his second lens as an angry heat-flare surrounding the psyker responsible.

  Inquisitor Caius didn’t care in the slightest that the left side of his face from temple to jaw line was a mess of expensive chrome and steel. He hadn’t given any true regard to his appearance in decades. He’d seen too many others scarred in his former mistress’s service to delude himself that his Inquisitorial duties would leave him attractive in any way. Caius was, in all things, something of a realist.

  He was also one of the few who had known shrineworld Kathur would fall. That galled him even now, weeks later, not because his warnings had gone unheeded – indeed, they had been heeded well, the response to his warnings had been as impressive as they were ruthless – but because the pupils of Inquisitor Kresskien were simply not used to failure.

  He waited now aboard his ship, The Night Star, sipping full-bodied vintage amasec and staring into the amber liquid’s depths, enjoying this opportunity to swim in memory. As Caius waited for Captain Thade, he mused on the moment he’d learned Kathur’s particular truth. The truth from the lips of a heretic. Such delicious irony. This had been months ago, in the weeks before the planet died.

  The heretic had screamed, of course. They always did.

  The traitor was incarcerated in the Kelmarl asteroid prison complex: a vermin-infested hole for some of Scarus Sector’s more wretched criminals, all of whom were deemed unfit for immediate execution by Imperial authorities and sentenced to lives of slave labour. Petty thieves whose lawyers had allowed them to escape local mutilation laws were slammed into squalid communal cells alongside small-time embezzlers and underhive gangers who avoided death sentences by ratting out their friends. Life in the Kelmarl complex was an endless cycle of short sleep allowances and long shifts in pressure suits mining within the asteroid’s tunnel network.

  The heretic undergoing interrogation had been locked up for weapons smuggling, selling weaponry bound for Imperial Guard regiments to bidding mercenary outfits in the pay of local governors. It seemed a textbook case to Kelmarl’s warden, and he had had the smuggler working his life away in the mines, breaking his back for the good of the Imperium. The Inquisition had arrived without warning, a single ship carrying a lone inquisitor and his small team, demanding to speak with an apparently minor criminal.

  The heretic had been quite a screamer.

  Caius swallowed a mouthful of the agonisingly expensive amasec, not enjoying the rich taste. The musing recollection turned sour. Even the memory of the moment annoyed him, as he’d faced the heretic at the end of days of torture.

  That screaming…

  …was relentless.

  Inquisitor Caius ignored the sound, frowning at the blood on the floor. If this carried on much longer, he was going to have difficulty walking in the room. With a sigh and a brief wave of his gloved hand, the inquisitor stopped the torture. It was boring and unproductive, and Caius was not a patient man.

  The solitary confinement cell was a box of a room with a red-streaked table as the only furniture. Pentagrammic sigils blazed on the grey floor, etched into the stone some hours before, each indented symbol filled with trickles of blessed water. The watery letters vibrated every time the heretic thrashed against the bonds that leashed him to the table.

  ‘Enough,’ said the inquisitor. His was a commanding voice, as one might expect from a man of his vocation, yet it carried with it an unnatural edge of roughness. The source of Caius’s vocal harshness was as clear as a second smile: a jagged scar across his throat told of an old injury and semi-successful reconstructive surgery. This too was earned in his interrogator days under Kresskien.

  The torturer stopped his work and stepped back from the surgery table, yet the man strapped there still screamed, his cries mixing with gasping breaths surging in and out of what was left of his face. Caius waited as the yells sank down into moans, then faded further into desperate, animalistic panting. He resisted the urge to look at his timepiece. The gold pocket watch rested comf
ortably in the pouch by his left holster. It had been a gift from his former mistress. A deathbed gift, in fact.

  He had performed the rituals of purification and repentance only a few times alone, but had assisted many times at the side of the old woman that had trained him. Caius knew what he was doing.

  ‘Jareth.’ The inquisitor’s voice was now that of a fine teacher or a gifted storyteller: engaging, considerate, emotional. It was almost impossible to tell his throat had been shredded by a xenos projectile weapon seventeen years before. ‘Heretic, I grow bored of this. I am running out of patience, and you are running out of blood. We’ve come to the endgame. It’s over now. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll see you dead before your heart beats out another painful thump. Is that not what you desire? Fast passage away from this agony?’

  Jareth’s reply – after three mumbled attempts at speech – was a short insult in Cadian vernacular. Caius was too far away, so the heretic spat at the torturer. The effort resulted in nothing more than a gooey string of bloody saliva crawling down the heretic’s own chin.

  Now Caius checked his timepiece. He was getting hungry, and the prison warden’s table had been surprisingly well-set with delicacies for the duration of the inquisitor’s stay. Maybe another ten minutes.

  Caius cleared his throat. The old damage to his neck made it sound like a dangerous purr, which reached the torturer’s senses. The torturer in question was a servitor mono-tasked to serve in the role, and various small blades, bone saws, drill bits and flesh-peeling hooks deployed from its mechanical arms as it registered the inquisitor’s displeased growl. Another gesture from Caius had the servitor backing down. He’d tried the scourging. Now it was time to offer mercy. No interrogation of lowlife detritus like Jareth, a mere cultist, should last this long. It was getting beyond the realm of being remotely amusing.

  ‘Jareth, listen to me.’ The inquisitor leaned close to the table now, gritting his teeth momentarily against the reek of disease lifting from the mutilated Chaos worshipper’s open wounds. ‘I know you sold those weapons to tainted men. You will die for that. But you suffer for no cause, enduring agony for no reason. In whoring your soul to the Ruinous Powers, you have ensured your death will be no release from pain. Unless you recant now. Unless you recant, pray for forgiveness, while there is breath left in your body.’