‘The foe is here,’ shouted Meritorius, pressing the arming stud on her boltgun. ‘Look to your faith and your firearms, Sisters! For the Emperor, get ready to fight!’
Alarm signals shot back along the tightly ranked column of the Imperial advance. They crackled through vox-channels. They flashed from tank to tank by means of raised hazard pennants. They echoed in the tight, disciplined barking of orders from Cadian sergeants. Blaskaine heard most of themas he sat within the belly of his Taurox with a headset clamped to his ear.
‘I need numbers, enemy positioning,’ he said. ‘Are there any of them behind us?’
‘Negative, sir,’ said Kasyrgeldt as information flowed in to the vehicle’s command console. ‘Looks like two sizeable forces, emerging from craters here and here.’ She jabbed at the console’s rudimentary auspex screen with her finger. ‘No word from the rearguard of anyone moving behind us.’
‘Split the platoons and push them out to flanks,’ said Blaskaine. ‘Staggered firing lines with sight-line priority to the heavy weapon squads. They’ve got bare slopes of rock to charge down, let’s punish them every step of the way.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Kasyrgeldt, and began disseminating his orders via vox. Meanwhile, Blaskaine switched channels.
‘Lieutenant Tasker, do you receive?’
‘Receiving, major,’ came Tasker’s voice.
‘Your lot are in reserve,’ said Blaskaine. ‘Hold the centre, watch our rear, and if the lines look like they’re about to break, reinforce immediately.’
‘Yes, major,’ said Tasker, sounding irritatingly upbeat as always. The lieutenant didn’t help his case as he signed off with a heartfelt ‘The Emperor protects!’
Blaskaine scowled as another booming horn blast echoed across the crater fields. He could hear the muffled sounds of tanks and infantry redeploying beyond the hull of his transport and took a moment to feel thankful for good Cadian efficiency.
‘Captain Maklen, Sub-Duke Velle-Marchon, Sister Superior Meritorius, do you read?’ he asked, keying into the group command channel. Voices came back to him, and he heard battle hymnals being sung in the background.
‘Major, the enemy are upon us,’ announced Velle-Marchon, with altogether too much relish for Blaskaine’s tastes.
‘I had noticed, thank you,’ replied Blaskaine. ‘Maklen, Velle-Marchon, I’m spreading my soldiers out into firing lines. Deploy your armour squadrons along their back lines and lend supporting bombardment. We’ll pound them to dust before they get anywhere near us.’
‘Major, respectfully, a solid armour charge to either flank could shatter them before they even get into small arms range,’ said Velle-Marchon. ‘The men are reporting mobs of miner-cultists and turncoat planetary militia, and not a great deal of anything else.’
‘Doesn’t that strike anyone as strange?’ asked Maklen. ‘I know the ways of heretics are obscure at best, but they’ve had time to prepare for our arrival and this is all they offer us?’
She fed the vid-feed from her tank’s turret optics through to their command screens. Blaskaine watched the grainy image of several thousand screaming figures running pell-mell down the slope of a crater to the northern flank of the Imperial force. They were dashing headlong, miner’s garb and defence trooper body armour daubed with bloody marks and ashen skull runes. Yet it was true, he thought. This was hardly a masterful ambush.
‘There is more to this,’ came the voice of Sister Meritorius. She sounded grim, thought Blaskaine, but that was nothing out of character. ‘Look to the storm, the icons.’
The image in Blaskaine’s monitor blurred and swung wildly as Maklen ordered her vox-thief redirected. It settled again with one of the obscene icons slightly out of focus at its centre and the black stormclouds heavy behind it.
‘Throne…’ breathed Kasyrgeldt as she peered over Blaskaine’s shoulder. The icon was flickering with streamers of unnatural light, and smoke was boiling up from somewhere near its base, out of sight behind the crater’s mountainous lip. Meanwhile, the clouds themselves roiled unnaturally. Lightning flashed through them, and Blaskaine’s frown deepened as he realised it was crimson, the colour of spilt blood.
‘The enemy prepare to strike at us with deviltry from beyond the void.’ The Saint’s voice came suddenly through the command channel, and Blaskaine realised she had been listening in the entire time. The thought made him feel obscurely guilty, though he hadn’t been consciously excluding her from command decisions. At least, so he told himself.
‘What should we do, Saint?’ asked Velle-Marchon.
‘Follow your major’s orders and pray to the Emperor,’ said Celestine. ‘They have burned offerings and given sacrifice to the Blood God, and that which they have set in motion cannot now be prevented. We can only endure, with faith in our hearts. Remember, the Emperor’s eye is upon us and His protection is upon our souls.’ With that, Celestine cut the link.
Blaskaine blinked. ‘Well… you heard the Saint,’ he said after a moment’s pause. ‘Still, if the Emperor protects then He does it with good Cadian steel and massed las-fire, so let’s be about it. Captain, sub-duke, you have your orders. Sister Superior, I assume your warriors will bolster our lines?’
‘We shall, major,’ said Meritorius. ‘For the Emperor.’
‘For the Emperor,’ chorused the officers, before setting to their duties with a will.
Meritorius jogged into position, her remaining Celestians flanking her. One of her Battle Sisters raised a reliquary on a banner pole at their backs, leading the Cadian soldiery around them in a bellicose battle prayer.
Cadian squads ranged away to either side of the Sisters’ position, their lasguns sending hissing volleys up the crater slopes. More Sororitas could be seen peppered along their lines, bolters roaring as they added their fire to the fusillade. The Cadian tanks loomed at their backs, and the dusty soil seemed to jump with the shockwaves as their cannons boomed again and again.
Cultists charged towards them in a screaming mass and died with hideous rapidity. Explosions blossomed amongst their lines, hurling tumbling corpses through the air. Las-blasts and bolt shells snatched more men and women from their feet by the second.
‘Their charge won’t even reach our lines,’ said Penitence. ‘The heretics submit themselves to senseless slaughter.’
‘The Saint says otherwise,’ said Meritorius, casting a glance back to where Celestine stood atop a Taurox transport, her Geminae Superia flanking her. ‘There is some heretic sorcery at work here, can you not feel it?’
She certainly could. Even as she raised her bolter and fired into the howling foe, the hairs were standing up on the back of her neck. Lightning cracked dry as firewood overhead, and lurid red. Thunder rumbled like an angry god. The energies gathering around the icons danced faster. They made her feel nauseous to look upon.
‘Mist,’ shouted a Cadian in surprise. ‘Mist rising from the dead!’
Meritorius saw he was right. The ragged remains of the enemy force were still pelting closer, snapping shots off from autoguns and laspistols as they charged. She had no doubt a similar spectacle was playing out on the southern flank. Yet her attention was captured not by the charging foe, but by the seething crimson vapours that rose from the dead behind them.
The miasma grew thicker by the second, and as their guns continued to hammer and the cultists continued to fall, so it swirled and gathered.
‘Sacrifices,’ she breathed. ‘They were ritual sacrifices, all of them!’
The sky suddenly lit with a ferocious webwork of blood red lightning blasts, and amidst a crash of furious thunder a blood-red rain began to fall. At the same instant, searing bolts of energy leapt from the huge icons that loomed over the battlefield. They struck the mist like sparks struck amidst promethium fumes, and a raging firestorm erupted upon the crater’s slopes.
Meritorius’ eyes widened as she saw da
rk figures swim into view through the smoke and the fire. Horned heads rose. Bestial roars clamoured above the hammering of gunfire. A sulphurous wind howled down to batter the Imperial lines.
‘Gird your souls and stand your ground, servants of the Emperor,’ Meritorius cried. ‘For they have conjured daemons!’
Major Blaskaine spun the hatch release and leapt from the side of his Taurox, laspistol already in hand. He had heard the terror in the voices spilling through the vox, then everything had been drowned out by a cacophony of howling, shrieking voices that had caused him to tear the vox-set from his head with a snarl of pain.
He had exchanged a look of horror with Kasyrgeldt, then they had drawn their weapons. Blaskaine’s boots hit the dirt and, braving the hot red downpour that immediately drenched him, he raised his magnoculars to peer upslope into the infernos that raged to the north and south.
Just as quickly, he dropped the magnoculars with a spasm of horror, recoiling and managing only through sheer force of will not to vomit.
‘Throne almighty,’ he gasped. ‘What in the Emperor’s name are those things? Monsters? Mutants?’
‘Oh Emperor, sir, this isn’t rain, it’s blood,’ said Kasyrgeldt in horror.
Blaskaine tasted copper. He grubbed blood from his eyes in revulsion, felt it coursing hot and wet over his skin, saturating his uniform. He looked upslope again and saw the enemy – the true enemy – were now charging towards the Imperial lines. Loping, long-legged creatures with red-scaled skin and horned heads brandished black blades as tall as a grown man. Monstrous hounds the size of horses raised baying howls as they barrelled down the slopes. Massive brass monsters burst from the flames and surged forwards on clattering mechanical legs, their flesh-metal forms twisting and writhing as they sprouted cannons and piston-driven claws. And there, amongst the masses, spreading vast, bat-like wings as it loomed to its full height, was a nightmare given living form. Thirty feet tall or more, the daemon lord had a nightmare approximation of a hound’s visage and wore a brass helm crowned with jagged horns. In one huge fist it held a black-bladed battle-axe, in the other a coiling brass whip. Its body was all dark red muscle and brazen armour plates, and it stood upon gigantic hooves.
Blaskaine’s thoughts leapt to the Imperial scriptures that he had read in his youth, to their talk of warp spawn that bedevilled the Imperial saints and devoured the souls of heretics. His mind rebelled at the notion that what they faced here might be no natural enemy at all, but rather some malefic manifestation from the beyond. It was impossible, surely. The worshippers of the Dark Gods were simply deluded, were they not? But then, he thought, an Imperial angel led his forces to battle this day. And if he accepted that, truly accepted it, then could the daemons of Chaos not also be real, literal creatures also? He quailed at the thought.
The wicked creature threw back its head and gave a bellow of pure fury that swelled louder and louder by the moment. Cadians fell to their knees amidst the bloody downpour and screamed their terror. The Imperial fusillade became ragged, some soldiers firing wild, others dropping their weapons from nerveless hands.
Blaskaine’s vision swam as the roar filled his mind, and suddenly he was somewhere else.
He stood by the runic panel that would close the lander’s loading ramp. Flames filled the skies and the ground shook. Behind him, wounded soldiers moaned and prayed, but so few. So few. Out there amidst the apocalyptic ruins of the burning cityscape, he could see the people of Kasyr Haslen striving desperately to reach their evacuation point. They reeled through the smoke, clutching bundles to their chests that he told himself were personal belongings and nothing more. Please, Emperor, they were nothing more. Flames roared. The flight crew screamed at him that they had to leave now before tectonic destabilisation pitched the lander over and escape became impossible.
Blaskaine stopped listening. He watched the people struggle and falter as the ground shook and molten rock burst up amongst them. He looked back at the soldiers in his charge and for one, shocking, shameful moment he thought of his own life, his own desire for escape. In that instant, he made his choice. It was his hand that pressed the runic panel. His voice he heard telling the flight crew to dust off at once and make for low orbit. His ears that heard the despairing screams of Cadian soldiers and citizens who were just yards from safety when he made his choice.
His shame, that would stay with him for the rest of his days.
Daemons surged down the crater slopes beneath a blackened sky. They screamed and howled as they fell upon the hapless Imperial soldiers. Blood sprayed, and heads tumbled from shoulders as the daemonic fiends plied their blades.
Preacher Gofrey bellowed prayers to the Emperor as he fired his pistol full into the face of a needle-fanged monster. His shots blew craters in its foul visage, but it was the vehemence of his faith that truly sent it reeling. Gofrey fired again and again, sending the unclean being howling back into the void whence it came.
‘Fight, you cowardly dogs, fight!’ he roared. Some of the soldiers around him complied, but they were spraying fire in blind panic. Most could not even manage that, stumbling or collapsing amidst the bloody rain, helpless against the onrushing foe. It had happened the moment the daemon lord roared, thought Gofrey. Some fell curse was upon the Cadians and the Battle Sisters both, and he thought he knew its source.
Unctorian Gofrey turned back to stare venomously at the true agent of the enemy. There she stood, atop an Imperial tank, her wings spread behind her and her blade in her hand. Her chosen Sisters were on their knees, struggling with the same terrors that beset their comrades. Yet Celestine stood tall, her visage set as though carved from stone. Her eyes burned and Gofrey saw tremors running through her limbs, even from this distance, sweat beading at her temples and running down her face. The blood rain hissed off the tank’s hull, yet not a drop touched Saint Celestine. No vitae soiled her perfect form, thought Gofrey in disgust.
Fools might take that for a miracle, for the Emperor’s power shielding His Living Saint from the corruption of Chaos. They might believe that she was doing battle with the onrushing daemons on some level beyond the physical, in a form that could only be perceived through the senses of the Emperor’s angels.
Gofrey knew better. He saw the way reality shimmered like a haze around the Saint. He witnessed, in fleeting after-images, the way the air boiled to flame around her and the ground seemed for a moment to fall away so that she stood atop a mountain of splintered bone and broken skulls. She was a thing of the empyrean, a being spat from the maw of the warp time and time again. What was that but a daemon, thought Gofrey, feeling his Emperor-given senses sing with the truth. Unnatural energies boiled from the Saint just as they boiled from the daemons of Khorne. Gofrey knew what she was, and with the absolute certainty of religious hatred, he reached for that which hung beneath his shirt.
It was time. The Emperor had spoken.
Then, the Saint leapt into motion, and Gofrey’s moment was gone.
The daemon’s roar filled Sister Meritorius’ world.
Sister Meritorius saw not a rain of blood, but of ashes. She felt agony within her chest and looked down to see the chestplate of her armour glowing with fiery heat. Meritorius tried to scream, instead coughing up a blackened cloud of smoke that plumed before her. She couldn’t breathe, could barely see. She clawed at her chest and ripped away molten clots of armour that burned into the flesh of her fingers.
Meritorius thumped to her knees, tortured chest heaving as her armour’s breastplate burned away from beneath. She looked down at the scorched hole where her chest should have been, felt her sanity teeter at the sight of a blackened flesh crater full of embers that were already dying out. No heart, just a charred ribcage full of ashes. Meritorius looked up, oily tears streaking her face, to see a vast hole burned in the skies high above. That was where the ashes fell from, she realised. Terra, burning, and her faith, burning her alive from the inside ou
t along with it.
All was ashes, thought Anekwa Meritorius. All was lost.
A sudden flare of golden light broke through the suffocating vision. It bathed her like sunlight parting clouds, and as it did the ashes billowed away and her chest became whole once more. She sucked in a screaming gasp of air, and the tears that tracked down her cheeks were once again just tears.
A figure slammed down beside her, and she looked up into the eyes of an angel.
‘Saint,’ she gasped.
A horned thing lunged, howling, and the Saint sliced it in half at the waist. She spun and stabbed, laying another fiend low before her Geminae Superia thumped down beside her on trails of flame and let fly. Their bolt pistols thundered and more daemons came apart in sprays of gore and ichor.
‘Sister Superior Meritorius,’ said Celestine as her hair danced in the furnace winds and a golden halo blazed at her temples. ‘The Emperor’s work remains before us. Will you fight beside me?’
Meritorius opened her mouth to reply, but no words would come. The light, she thought. That golden light, that spilled from the Saint like the rays of a blazing star. How could she have ever thought that light had gone out? Had she truly been so blind?
Strength surging through her limbs, Sister Meritorius rose to her feet.
Embers became sparks. Sparks became flames. Anekwa Meritorius gave herself gladly to the fire as she felt it flow through her.
‘I will,’ she said and, raising her bolter, she let fly.
Major Blaskaine thought he saw a wall of fire sweeping across Cadia’s ravaged surface. He had waited too long, and now they would all be killed. But then he saw it as the dawn, a golden sunrise that filled his senses and warmed him to his very core.
As suddenly as it had gripped him the vision was gone. Blaskaine realised he was knelt in a bloody morass, Kasyrgeldt slumped next to him, as their soldiers fought and died before them.
‘Throne above!’ he cursed, surging to his feet.
Celestine - Andy Clark Page 11