Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  A swift rap on the side of Mortensen’s helmet brought him back to the here and now. It was Rask, pointing up towards the cockpit and donning a head-set. Sass was behind him but swiftly disappeared up the companionway ladder. The intense adjutant never did drops, having little liking for heights in general, despite being attached to an air-mobile storm troop. He usually helped coordinate operations with Rask, where his keen mind could wrangle with the big picture and weigh up alternative strategies, should the situation on the ground go tits up: which it usually did.

  ‘Try and draw some of their fire from us,’ Mortensen hollered, compensating for the helmet and turbulence in the bay. Rask nodded and smiled his crooked smile. ‘You know,’ the major added, ‘without actually drawing fire on yourselves.’

  The captain took an awkward step towards the companionway. ‘Watch your back!’ he called from the steps.

  ‘That’s why I brought you,’ the major yelled back. Mortensen peered down at the roofs and towers of the cita-cathedra. Standing astride the massive adamantium doors of the building was the mighty Imperial Warlord Titan Mortis Maximus. The cathedra plaza was a rippling carpet of revolutionaries. Mobs swarmed around the Titan’s gigantic feet and hung from suicidal heights as they attempted to scale the sides of the god-machine, desperately searching for some kind of an entrance.

  As the Vertigo rolled to port the major breathed in the full, awesome lethality of the metal mountain below. He wasn’t the first to stare in marvel at the destructive capabilities of the war machine; to wonder what it would be like to command such incredible power.

  If he hadn’t been so stunned by the spectacle, Mortensen might have noticed that something was seriously wrong.

  As it was, it was Rosenkrantz that clocked it first and broke in across the vox-channel in sickening realisation: ‘Those plasma silos are open.’

  Mortensen growled.

  The Spectre’s cargo bay suddenly crackled with a blinding, searing light. A momentary shockwave of heat rolled through the aircraft as a fat beam of plasma energy blasted skyward past the Vertigo.

  The aircraft took a stomach-churning tumble, throwing Mortensen into the wall of the belly compartment. Rask missed his footing on the companionway and fell. He skimmed across the slick floor of the carrier, snatching wildly for a handhold. Several of the aircraft’s door gunners and the storm-troopers struck out their arms for him but their safety lines and harnesses tore them back. The major dropped and sunk his fist into the webbing of Rask’s passing flak jacket, just managing to grab the flailing captain before he slipped out of the bay door. Rask’s legs dangled off the ramp, kicking at the spinning nothing below, desperate for a foothold that wasn’t there. Clawing his way up Mortensen’s carapace dropsuit, the officer hauled himself back inside the bay door. The major brought him up to his helmet faceplate.

  ‘You okay?’ Mortensen bawled.

  ‘Vrekkin’ great: next stupid question,’ Rask howled back.

  ‘Status!’ the storm-trooper called into his helmet vox-link.

  ‘We just lost White Thunder,’ Rosenkrantz shot back. In macabre illustration Vertigo’s rolling spin revealed the Spectre as she fell past. Her belly, cockpit and tail section were intact but her starboard wing was completely gone, burned out of existence by the column of plasma firepower the cathedra had just unleashed at some target in the upper atmosphere. As Vertigo’s own tail came around again Mortensen caught another glimpse of White Thunder’s spiralling form.

  ‘Is Deliverance hit?’

  Mortensen and Rask exchanged a grim glance as the vox crackled with static suspense.

  ‘Negative,’ Benedict finally cut in. ‘Deliverance is clear. Looks to Commander Waldemar like a ranging shot. He thinks that it might be prudent to–’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Mortensen barged in.

  ‘You’ve got to go,’ Rask called – still clutching the ramp struts as the Illian industriascape whirled by behind him. The major nodded.

  ‘Get all aircraft down on the deck,’ the major ordered.

  ‘We’re not going to last very long at street level.’

  ‘Longer than against those silos,’ Mortensen answered with harsh logic. Rask nodded. ‘Locate the Spectre and reroute the convoy to pick them up. The whole city will be coming down on them.’

  ‘Major,’ Benedict piped up. ‘Deliverance reports the cathedra’s plasma batteries are charging for another orbital assault.’

  ‘We can’t be here,’ Rosenkrantz added, her words laced with alarm.

  ‘Okay, keep your flight suit on,’ Mortensen barked, signalling Magister Militum Trepkos and the Redemption Corps to come forward on their snaglines. Corporal Vedette presented herself, slipping a helmet down over her platinum blonde hair. Her limp was all but gone, but even if her thigh wound had been giving her hell, Vedette knew better than to show it on an operation. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Born ready, sir,’ she beamed back.

  A Mordian by birth, Zola Vedette had long been distinguishing herself in the storm-trooper ranks, when she met Major Mortensen. She’d been part of a rearguard force left to cover the withdrawal of the Noctan Strikes from the night world of Nebrus IX. Disease had swept across the tiny planet and the cities had been overrun by plague zombies. The Redemption Corps had been brought in at the eleventh hour with the clock already running on an Ordo Sepulturum sanctioned cyclonic orbital cleansing. Mortensen’s men had snatched the Noctans and Vedette’s stalwart rearguard from the planet surface mere moments before torpedo impact. The major had Rask pull some strings the next day.

  ‘As you were.’

  The drop troops were already filing down the ramp in their carapace armour and helmets. Like Mortensen, the storm-troopers carried their hellguns and weapons slung on their packs, in order to avoid distorting the aerodynamics of the Redemption Corps’ trademark high altitude thunderbolt descent. The hope was that the troopers would move faster than the anti-aircraft guns could track. A distinct bonus when freefalling into a shooting gallery, where a street urchin with a flintlock could cut you in half with a stray shot.

  Vedette proceeded to count the storm-troopers out, barking their names in quick succession as each in turn pitched off the Spectre’s ramp with the certainty of newborn Tallarn thundervultures.

  The last of the squad gave Vedette a nod of their helmets before vaulting into the maelstrom outside: Minghella, who’d been checking everyone’s oxygen; Pryce, his carapace jangling with cheap icons and relics, and then the replacements: Greco – infamous spire-breaker and Progenium runaway; Teague, the Elysian young blood; Kynt, the one-eyed comms-officer and Quant, Gorskii’s demolitions stand-in. The Valhallan storm-trooper had barely survived the 1001st’s bloody rebellion and unfortunately had lost the battle, as so many had, on the operating table. As always, Rask had been ready with suitable substitutes: troopers the major could already trust or those that Rask believed he would get to.

  They were followed by Vedette, who gave an obligatory salute that was more habit than requirement before peeling off into oblivion. The major watched them tumble away from the aircraft, taking a few steps of his own before launching off the ramp.

  Holding his hands behind his back, Mortensen plunged helmet first through the thermals, rapidly falling into the slipstream created by the other drop troops. Like a small meteor shower, the Redemption Corps streaked for the planet’s surface with the heavens howling around them.

  Mortensen ate it up: heart racing with the desire to be part of the whole wanton abandon of it. He didn’t hunger for blood – he was no savage or berserker. He merely thrived on the cutting edge of possibility. Nobody held Zane Mortensen’s fate in their hand: what he did, his very next action, and the one after that, would determine his destiny for good or for ill. That was where he felt most at peace. Crossing the terminator of exigency, on the event horizon of the unforeseen, where he was at that very moment.


  The entire city suddenly vanished as explosions tore the air to shreds around him. An oil slick of black smog swiftly blanketed the area in the wake of hundreds of enemy shells splatter-bombing the sky. Mortensen swung this way and that, making his trajectory more difficult to predict, but it was largely futile. Some insane genius inside the cathedra hadn’t been satisfied with hurling shafts of boiling plasma into the heavens and had ordered the gargoyle encrusted macro-cannons manned and armed.

  As he punctured the bottom of the inkblot cloud, the major caught sight of the Vertigo, corkscrewing around their descent pattern, attempting to draw the artillery fire. The Spectre was rewarded with an alarmingly obliging spree of thunder blasts across the nose of the aircraft, forcing Rosenkrantz to roll the Navy bird sharply to starboard.

  Focusing once again on the fast approaching cityscape, Mortensen noticed that one of his storm-troopers had broken formation. Certainly, each corpsman would have had to negotiate the dangers of the blanket barrage, but Pryce was careering all over, arms loose and legs flailing in the backwash. Bringing his own arms in tighter and helmet down, Mortensen surged forwards for the trooper. As he crossed to Pryce’s other side, he could see what had happened. The trooper must have caught the blast wave of one of the detonations: his left leg and arm were a ragged mess of blood and bone and the side of his helmet and visor were shattered. Unconscious or dead, he wouldn’t be able to fire his own grav-chute.

  Pushing his body to the limit, Mortensen willed himself onwards, drawing closer and closer to the injured soldier, desperate to reach the vectorpull and activate his chute. At least that way, Vertigo could swing in and collect him.

  As his fingertips brushed the pack’s repulsion vents, Pryce was ripped from his grasp. The air was quaking with a fresh shower of artillery explosions. Taking the full force of one of the sporadic shells, the unfortunate trooper was blasted skyward in a drizzle of gore and religious iconography, catapulting the major into a freefall spin. Little good the seals and relics had done him in the end.

  For a small eternity, Illium became a vertiginous assault on Mortensen’s senses: a vomit-inducing kaleidoscope of reversals with g-forces fighting inside his body for possession of his centre of gravity. Perhaps following some previous pattern of thought, Mortensen’s fingers found the vectorpull of his own chute and he yanked it furiously. The pack bucked, trying to right itself in the middle of the major’s rolling rotation. Simultaneously the chute cut the descent velocity and mastered the spin, sending a jolt through Mortensen that he could feel in his eyeballs.

  Now his eyes had stopped swimming with motion, Mortensen got a grip on his position. The grav-chute had slowed his descent to a mere glide about two hundred metres above the cathedra concourse. Immediately below him the god-machine Mortis Maximus stood astride the mighty adamantium doors of Artellus-Magna. The Warlord Titan was silent and still, immobilised as Trepkos had told them. The concourse was flooded with insurgent mobs mounting a futile assault on the colossal war machine with small arms and grenades, although this seemed more of a display than a genuine attempt to breach the Warlord’s impenetrable armour. Even the lowliest Mechanicus factory hand would know that the more optimistic options for forced entry lay with the war machine’s bridge and the weapon system’s maintenance bulkheads. And this was where a few hundred of the renegade Imperials were headed, surging up gangways and grapnels with little care for safety or sanity.

  Below, Mortensen watched his storm-troopers establish a two-team perimeter on the metallic expanse of the Warlord’s armoured hood. He could make out Conklin giving the enemy troops a headache with the constant chatter of his bolter. Leaning into a course correction the major drifted above them. Firing the clips on his harness Mortensen dropped the remaining metres from his grav-chute to the chilled hull of the monstrous god-machine. He rolled into a crouch, his pack activated and his hellgun humming.

  Suddenly Kynt was behind him, humping the extra weight of the troop master-vox. Helmet off and blinking with his good eye through the blasts hammering the metal about them, the copper-headed comms-officer extended him the vox-hailer.

  ‘Major.’ Rask said.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Vector Four has a visual on the Spectre crash site, couple of clicks south of your position. The pilots confirm movement within and large numbers of enemy targets moving in on their position.’

  ‘How close is the convoy?’

  ‘Not close enough. I’ve re-routed the column but Deleval’s run into heavy resistance.’

  ‘Can the assault carriers reach them?’ Mortensen asked. It was the simplest choice.

  ‘Negative. Too dangerous. They’ve tried and already taken several hits. I’ve had them move onto the pick-up.’

  ‘Other options, captain?’

  Rask swallowed.

  ‘We could head in. Vertigo could rappel our snipers down near to the crash site, while it’s still relatively quiet, and have them work their way over to the bird. Buy a bit of time until the convoy arrives.’

  Mortensen grumbled to himself. The Spectres did carry marksmen for extra air cover on the dispersal. Still, he didn’t like it. The Spectre; the convoy; the snipers. Things were getting messy down on the ground.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Opech and Sarakota.’

  He knew about Sarakota. He’d assigned him to Vertigo. Opech was Rask’s choice: both of the snipers hailed from the feral world of Khongkotan, a bleak dust hole of canyons, cavern systems and backstabbing tribesmen. Whereas Sarakota spoke little, the Imperial Creed hadn’t quite imprinted itself on Opech: he was still full of tribal belligerence and was known to brawl with his brother Khongkotans. As a people, however, they had the senses of a raptor and made excellent scouts and marksmen.

  The major nodded silently to himself. ‘Do it.’

  ‘Rask, out.’

  The metal around Mortensen flashed with the ricochet of las-fire. The Titan was crawling with Mechanicus defectors, some of whom had taken up position on and around the war machine’s hulking shoulders, pinning the Redemption Corpsmen down and pushing them back. Apart from their own abandoned grav-chutes, the hood offered little in the way of cover and already Vedette’s skirmish line was retreating.

  The renegades couldn’t shoot for dust – that much was clear from the wild pattern of fire – but the intensity of the assault was growing, with each new climber adding his muzzle to the collection aimed at the storm-troopers.

  Suppression fire was all the corporal and her men had to offer the rebels in return, the hellguns hurling bursts of short range, power-conserving fire at the mobs. Such tactics were a necessary evil for the storm-troopers. They travelled light and moved fast: their missions dependent upon surgical execution rather than collateral damage. As Mortensen had assured Krieg, the 364th Volscian Shadow Brigade would mop up these degenerates – eventually.

  Vedette clicked her hellgun briefly to automatic and bounced backward on the tips of her boots, splitting rounds between different clusters of closing insurgents. Mortensen met her at the lip of the Titan’s hood where Greco and Specialist Elek Quant were lashing lines and descenders to a sensor array.

  Squatting by the virtually non-existent cover offered by the small forest of aerials, Mortensen and Vedette crouched shoulder to shoulder.

  ‘We lost Pryce,’ the major informed her stoically.

  Vedette reached into her carapace and pulled out a piece of shattered chrome shell, trailing leads, valves and gore. ‘Trepkos.’

  ‘Great,’ he snarled back. ‘Plan B.’

  The Mordian was way ahead of him and turned to present Quant and TFC Greco.

  ‘Run a bypass on the bridge main-hatch runelock,’ Mortensen barked at Greco, who gave him the kind of furtive, guilty look he always gave him before breaking a security system.

  ‘Mechs trust us to snatch the crew but they don’t trust us with the code
s?’ the arch-larcenist sniffed. He’d dumped his helmet, his suit sweat-band and five o’clock shadow making his crab-face look even more horribly splayed than usual.

  ‘Politics,’ said the major, rolling his eyes theatrically and slipping into a harness.

  ‘What if I can’t… this is a Titan, after all,’ Greco put to him.

  ‘Just get us past the shell. Uncle can work his magic on the bulkhead mechanism.’

  That’s what the Redemption Corps called Quant. He was one of the squad’s old hands. An adamantium nerve and a lifetime’s working knowledge of explosive devices had made him an easy choice for demolitions specialist, and Gorskii had learned a great deal under his tutelage. ‘Okay, Uncle?’

  ‘We’re Redemption Corps,’ the old specialist murmured sagely under his moustache. ‘We’ll improvise.’

  Snapped into his descender, Mortensen and the two corpsmen kicked off the edge of the hood and rappelled the distance between the hood and the command deck, leaving Vedette to bark orders and hold the skirmish line.

  As soon as Greco’s boots hit the dome roof he slid down across the convex armour plating and onto his stomach where he went to work on the bridge top-hatch. Uncle started to assemble the demolition charge he was intending to use on the pressurised hatch bulkhead, leaving Mortensen to watch over them with his droning hellgun.

  Greco was surprisingly fast. The trooper simply lay back, resting his head on one arm as though he were reclining in an obscura den. The hull shell sighed and parted, leaving a circular opening gaping to the sky. ‘Progenium installations have better security than that,’ the spire-breaker told them. ‘You know, there was this one time–’

  ‘Greco.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘All yours, old man,’ the TFC told Quant, shifting back up the metal dome. The specialist moved in with his charge, trailing detonator cable and tools.

  His charge assembled, Uncle began to back up the hull himself, a palm grip detonator in one fist. The three men backed in under the hood and put their backs against the cool hull.