Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  An explosion of expletives from the surgeon denoted another blunder by the orderly and deterioration in the status of the patient. There was a clink as another barbed piece of frag was deposited in the dish.

  Casting bloodied eyes around the room Krieg found his cap and leather greatcoat hanging on a peg by the infirmary door, the webbing shredded and a rent where the right arm used to be. The door itself was a security bulkhead with a pedal and a scratched plas porthole. Through the porthole he spotted a stylised skull helmet he recognised immediately. The bleached bone of the helmet frontispiece bobbed in and out of view as its owner stood sentry outside the surgery, occasionally peering in through the shaded, reinforced lenses of the skull sockets.

  Krieg flicked his eyes between the porthole and the frantic shadows behind the drape: now or never. He never thought to actually check his legs. They could have been broken or trussed up like his arm, but as he pulled aside the foil sheet he found to his delight that they were relatively unscathed. The gap-toothed surgeon had had little reason to molest them further and Krieg was still wearing his Commissariat braces, breeches and boots.

  Pushing himself off the sheet he limped across the room, the creak of the gurney lost in the struggles behind the drape. Whilst the cocktail of tranquilisers coursing through his veins shielded him from the agony of such movement, he did feel sluggish and fragile and was acutely aware of the limitations his battered body was placing on his fanciful expectations. For a dangerous moment he almost tumbled, his frostbitten foot failing to take his full weight.

  Krieg slid up against the wall and buried himself in the leather folds of his greatcoat. He didn’t have to wait long. Within moments of the bone faceplate appearing at the porthole there was a hydraulic whoosh and the security bulkhead rolled open. An ebony-clad figure in Sororitas power armour rushed in, the skull helmet scouring the room, the business end of her ivory-inlaid bolter pointing squarely at Krieg’s empty gurney.

  With whirlwind impatience the sentry tore back the drape to reveal the orderly and surgeon up to their elbows in the Navy grunt’s gore, giving Krieg just enough time to slip his free hand through the folds of his leather greatcoat and the battle-sister’s bolt pistol out of her ermine-lined holster. The sister tore around to find herself staring down the barrel of her own weapon.

  ‘Lose it,’ Krieg commanded, his voice hoarse but full of determination. ‘And the helm.’

  The battle-sister’s shoulders slackened slightly before tossing the bolter onto Krieg’s gurney. Unclasping the seals, she pulled off the skull-faced helmet, allowing a platinum bob of hair to fall and shimmer back into place. Krieg nodded slowly. ‘Thought it was you.’

  ‘Do you really think this wise, cadet-commissar?’ the young battle-sister asked, her full, dark lips forming a petulant pout.

  ‘Me and my armour-piercing rounds will be the only ones asking questions here today,’ Krieg returned with venom. ‘Now, tell me where I can find that skeetmunger major.’ He shook the pistol at her. ‘We have some questions for him also.’

  The sister flashed her eyes at him: ‘I’m not at liberty to give you that information…’ The bolt pistol crashed, sending an explosive bolt sailing past the battle-sister’s ear.

  ‘I mean it,’ Krieg told her rawly.

  Keeping the pistol on the sister, Krieg gave the surgeon his bloody eyes, before waggling the fingers of his trussed arm. ‘You responsible for this?’

  The horse-faced man nodded fearfully. ‘C-C-Crayne. Incarcetorium Medical officer.’

  ‘This is a prison?’

  Crayne nodded.

  ‘Well, Crayne, thank you. Now, I’m going to tell you what the sister and I here, already know. She’ll die before she gives me that pathetic piece of information. You, on the other hand know what this can do,’ Krieg said, moving the muzzle across to the medic. ‘And worse, whatever it does do, you know that your bald friend here will be doing the procedure. So, without further delay, where is that malingering…’

  ‘Solitary confinement,’ Crayne blurted without hesitation, ‘one of the oubliettes, I think: cell-block Gamma.’

  The battle-sister’s top lip curled. ‘You do this and you’ll never wear that cap again,’ she assured him, nodding to the aquila-embossed commissar’s cap hanging from the nearby hook.

  Krieg ignored her and scanned the surgery thoughtfully.

  ‘Will he make it?’ the cadet-commissar asked, twitching the bolt pistol at the unfortunate Navy crewman.

  Crayne shook his head slowly, clearly wondering whether or not it was the right thing to do. ‘I can make him comfortable, but he won’t be saved.’

  ‘Do it, then.’

  The gangling medical officer selected a tranquiliser from his utensil tray and stung the patient in the neck with the powerful sedative.

  ‘Thank you Crayne. You’ll be relieved to know that this very difficult day is almost over for you. Now, if you would be so good as to make everyone else in the room, including yourself, similarly comfortable,’ Krieg entreated with the flash of a smile for the seething battle-sister, ‘I’ll be on my way.’

  Chapter Two

  All Roads Lead to Terra

  I

  They called it Camp Carfax, after the slipway.

  Sixty million square metres of open ground. On a densely populated world like Spetzghast, that kind of luxury was usually reserved for the mercantile houses, geno-industrialists and broker barons: Arch-Commissary Oszminog, Lord Ballantyne and his inbred hierocratical cronies. Carfax Drydock was a veritable oasis of breathing space, making your average hull-welding Spetzghastian dizzy with agoraphobic excess. Only the ancient Wastrel, a cyprid-encrusted haulage brig, sat suspended in dry-dock after a light collision with an asteroid.

  Lieutenant Koulick Krieg had come to the Bethesda subsector capital three months ago, seconded to the retinue of the mysterious Inquisitor Aurek Herrenvolk. The 123rd Pontifical Strikes were a venerated company of Inquisitorial storm-troopers that had been providing security for the Ergotia witch trials, conducted under his old master Brutus Schenker, but Herrenvolk’s need on Spetzghast was deemed greater and the contingent of Inquisitorial storm-troopers was hastily extracted, leaving the outranked Schenker with only his own operatives and some local high-plains muscle to conduct the trials.

  Krieg had warmed to Schenker, who was hands-on in his duties and a respectably tough son of a bitch. He found his new lord and master to be a completely different animal. Whereas Schenker had a nose for corruption and a common sense, meat-grinder approach to combating the evils of heresy, Herrenvolk preferred to work at a distance and rarely left the confines of his sleek Inquisitorial corvette, stationed in high orbit around Spetzghast. Barrack gossip put this down to some horrific disfigurement or debilitation earned during his famous service in the Hellicon Mitigations. Krieg thought it more likely that Herrenvolk was a psyker who worked primarily through his recruits and operatives, as some inquisitors did – never having to get their own hands dirty. Although the lieutenant had never seen the esoteric inquisitor, the Pontificals had shared the corvette with a whole host of Herrenvolk’s staid henchmen, savants and of course, the Ecclesiarchical forces that shared responsibility for the investigations on Spetzghast – the Sisters of the Immaculate Flame, although the Sororitas largely restricted themselves to the cloister decks.

  As Krieg emerged from the shadow of the Wastrel, he caught sight of the network of razor wire compounds, the temporary lookout posts and killing grounds established in between. Carfax had become a provisional Ordo Hereticus internment camp, holding upward of two thousand Spetzgastian heretics and unbelievers.

  Reports of an epidemic of cult-related spree killings had originally brought Inquisitor Herrenvolk to the far-flung Bethesda subsector. The killings seemed random enough. Plenty of blood was spilt amongst both the urbanites who toiled in the surface granaries, depots and warehouses, seeking r
espite in the bars, scud-wrestling pits and obscura dens in between – and their betters, who made unimaginable wealth trading bulk wares in the bustling emporia and exchange sectors. The slaughter often involved firearms, but not exclusively and affected both sexes in terms of victim and perpetrator ratios. Local chasteners eliminated the possibility of a drug problem, but were so deep in bodies, anything was possible. Spetzghast had hardly ground to a halt, but there were enough delays and concern to warrant higher authorities becoming involved.

  Aurek Herrenvolk was a natural choice for such an assignment: a notable case at the beginning of his career involved mass ritual slaughter by berserkers belonging to Death Cults on Gasaki V. Early investigation by the inquisitor’s agents had turned up little in the way of similar Chaos practice on the giant trade world.

  Like any populous Imperial planet, cult activity on Spetzghast was endemic. Amongst the more colourful factions Krieg had witnessed were the ‘Mezzanine’; various Wyrm Cults; Dark Technology nuts and the disturbing Rebus Sectarians.

  Amongst these oddities, the Carfax Inquisitorial internment camp mainly housed sect associates of Anatoly Spurrlok’s ‘Doomsday Brethren’ – a popular Redemptionist personality cult, based around geno-industrialist Spurrlok and his ‘finding’ of the God-Emperor in the Lazareth system. The ‘Brethren’ had followers in all areas of Spetzghastian society, their numbers concentrated around the cooperatives and the lower freight stacks, especially the organic vaults and tower silos.

  Isolated Redemptionist cults were a common phenomenon throughout the Imperium, but Herrenvolk’s apprentice, Interrogator Angelescu, had found a pattern in the killings and connected it to the actions of certain more outspoken members of the Brethren. Greater credence was lent to the young interrogator’s theory when he was found desiccated in a dust silo where he had been buried with his bodyguards in six kilotonnes of cereal grain. Resources were re-allocated and the Brethren cited as a prime threat.

  As Krieg and his men walked the axis between the dozens of fortified compounds that made up the camp, floods of cultists abandoned their prayers and polygamous huddles and washed up silently against the barbed fences. The object of their drop-jaw reverence and dread was Krieg’s latest capture: the man himself, Anatoly Spurrlok. Prognosticator of planetary cataclysm and galactic doom, Spurrlok was the spiritual leader of the ‘Brethren’ on Spetzghast and a one man walking personality cult.

  He wasn’t walking now, however, as Krieg had him lashed to an adamantium crucifix in the style of the Imperial aquila – the motorised treads of which were cutting up the slipway decking. When the cultists looked at their hallowed leader they saw a demi-god: Krieg saw a monstrous, biologically enhanced creation. His skin was like parchment, stretched well beyond its fading elasticity to accommodate more muscle and sinew than the geno-industrialist’s frame could bear. The vat-grown muscle added grotesque bulk to his torso and arms and was threaded through with bulbous, designer glands to drive the extra mass. If this wasn’t enough, with his spindly head and legs, the proportions of Spurrlok’s body were thrown out further by the presence of unnatural muscular configurations where they shouldn’t be. The cultist’s body was criss-crossed with bulbous tendons, nerve clusters and the brawn needed to drive them.

  With his arms painfully stretched across the span of the Imperial eagle’s gleaming wings, the false prophet’s skull nestled inside a carved effigy of the eagle’s noble head and beak. Here a void current was passed between Spurrlok’s temples, making it impossible for the heretic to pass water unaided, let alone conceive of an escape plan.

  ‘All yours,’ the lieutenant told the members of the Frateris Militia at the gate of the Narthex. All bare flesh and leather, the brothers peered out of zipper slits in their conical hoods in dumb silence. Krieg hadn’t quite got used to the zealots’ unsettling stares – that was if a silent and all but featureless leather hood qualified as a stare. The Inquisitorial storm-trooper had little desire to see underneath the masks, however, fearing that the features beneath might be more unsettling still. As a mark of the upmost respect and servitude to St. Valeria the Younger, the Aphonac-Stack Probists had bitten off their own tongues in order that the impurity of faithless lies not pass their lips. The fanatical Probists – like the Sisters of the Immaculate Flame they served alongside – prized truth over all things.

  An austere Sister of Battle carrying a skull face-plated helmet under one arm came forward and gave Krieg’s crucified prisoner an impassive glance. Her platinum fringe sparkled in the poor illumination of the slipway. The ‘Narthex’ was the Adepta Sororitas’s base of operations in the camp, where senior heretics were tried and tested and the most dangerous cultists imprisoned in stasis tubes. It was also where the sisters slept under the watchful eye of Immolators and Exorcists and kept common Guardsmen like Krieg awake at night with their martial beauty.

  ‘Be careful,’ the lieutenant called after the battle-sister as she joined the squad of Celestians escorting the itinerant crucifix inside. ‘Don’t underestimate him; my men found that out the hard way.’ He gestured to several stretchers being lugged into the tent-sanatorium. A chastener and a couple of Krieg’s storm-troopers had been foolish enough to come within grasping distance of Spurrlok’s girder arms and had paid the price. Twisting and turning in ways Krieg hadn’t imagined possible, the demagogue had splintered bones and torn limbs clean out of their sockets, before smashing the men into the rockcrete of the vault floor.

  Unimpressed, the sister held him in a withering gaze: ‘Would you like Canoness Santhonax’s personal gratitude, lieutenant?’

  Krieg couldn’t help the shimmer of a wounded expression that crossed his boyish features. Perhaps it was this that momentarily softened the battle-sister’s stony gaze, or the stifled amusement of Krieg’s own men. ‘The Emperor expects, lieutenant… the Emperor expects.’ Then, she was gone.

  Krieg shouldn’t have been surprised: the Ecclesiarchy and Inquisition worked together across the galaxy, towards common goals and identical purpose. They were very much separate organisations, however, and had their own very particular ways of working towards those goals. Tension, all to often, was the unavoidable byproduct.

  Krieg collected himself. ‘Sergeant Odell!’

  ‘Sir?’ the hefty officer snapped to.

  ‘Dismiss the chasteners; they should return to their precinct. Have our men turn in. They’ll need their strength. We’re going back into the vaults tomorrow at dawn. The sisters should have some further intelligence for us by then.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ Odell boomed, masking grunts of exhausted disapproval from the storm-trooper unit. ‘You heard the good lieutenant. Hit the showers. You smell like a swarm of pack-rats. Dead ones, at that…’

  II

  The pavilion was less glamorous than the Narthex, lacking as it did the Imperial Creed paraphernalia and consecrated instruments of interrogation-art. From here Herrenvolk’s Inquisitorial storm-troopers ran their operations and monitored day-to-day activity in the Ordo Hereticus internment facility. Instead of ornately armoured Celestians, the command post of the 123rd Pontifical Strikes boasted a pair of staunch Inquisitorial storm-troopers who stood sentinel while Captain-Commandant Kowalski oversaw the smooth running of the camp. Krieg went limp inside as he realised that even they were missing this evening, suggesting that Kowalski was out on his rounds – walking the base camp perimeter and springing surprise inspections on the sentries. This was the captain-commandant all over: devoted to his paranoia.

  Krieg had come to dread these reports. Upon operation completion he was invariably on the verge of physical collapse, run as he was from one side of the underburgh to the other in the pursuit of faithless deviants and the oxygen of any heretical purge: information. A capable officer, if a little narrow-minded, Kowalski fancied himself better than a heretic’s turnkey, and had of late taken to pumping the lieutenant laboriously for every mission detail: Krieg’s mou
nting successes and growing reputation a constant threat to the camp commander’s own prospects.

  With Interrogator Angelescu dead and Herrenvolk apparently elsewhere, the Ecclesiarchy was now effectively running the Ordo Hereticus purgation on Spetzghast. Canoness Diamanta Santhonax was in command of the coordinated Ordo/Ministorum purge and for the past few weeks Kowalski and Krieg had taken their orders from her.

  Whereas Krieg’s impressive accomplishments had long reached the ears of the battle-sister, Kowalski was still viewed as a cog turning inside a well-oiled machine. So the captain-commandant routinely had Krieg turn in gratuitously extensive mission details, firstly to find ways in which the lieutenant’s achievements could be turned to reflect favourably on his own and secondly to exhaust the junior officer further and limit his ability to accomplish his next unnecessarily perilous mission.

  ‘Sir?’ Krieg called in through the Pavilion entrance. He had to make sure. If he tried to get some sleep, the commandant would only have him roused anyway. To his surprise, he heard low voices and ventured slowly through the nets. Krieg recognised one of the voices immediately: the sibilant menace of Lieutenant Cyrus Rudd of Beta Platoon.

  ‘That’s groxcrap and you know it. Krieg? Captain, that gretch-fondler’s nothing a fragging won’t see to–’

  ‘I said it’s out of my hands. Do you get it? Came from the top. Orders, lieutenant.’

  ‘Rutger’s well overdue; and what about the hours I put in on that Mezzanine connection? Who’s taking care of my interests, eh? Krieg walks around with a stick up his backside and gets thrown a bone? How’s that work?’