Honourbound - Rachel Harrison

by Warhammer 40K

  What it would mean if Lucia were betrayed, and not the betrayer.

  Raine looks to her timepiece held tight in her hand, knowing the datacrystal to be inside. The one that is meant to hold the truth, but that she has still not managed to unlock.

  It is like being back at the scholam. Being tested without knowing the limits of the test or what it is meant to teach. Those were always the hardest lessons to learn, the ones that hurt the most, but in the end, they were often the greatest lessons too.

  The timepiece ticks over to the mark and Raine puts it back into the inside pocket of her greatcoat. She pushes everything aside but what is immediately before her and steps up to stand in front of her regiment. The strength of three companies of the Eleventh Antari Rifles stand ready on the rockcrete beside their troop transports and armour support and Valkyrie wings. There is ice on the wind, bitter and cold. The Laxian dawn is dim and throttled by storm clouds.

  To Raine, it’s a comfort.

  ‘Today, we stand in the city of Defiance,’ Raine shouts the words, her voice carrying easily across the muster yard. ‘A city that has been tainted by our enemies, and must be made fit to once more bear its name.’

  She draws her sabre, and holds it in the air. Up to the storm.

  ‘Defiance will once against stand defiant. We will make it so, by faith and fury!’

  They answer her as one, with her own words.

  Faith. And. Fury.

  And Raine answers them with their own words.

  ‘By fire and thunder!’ she cries.

  And this time, their answer is louder even than the storm overhead.

  Haro’s gear is new. Fresh stamped off the line. Her helmet runs a little large, and she’s struggling with the fastening on the strap used to tighten it, though Wyck knows that’s got nothing to do with the fit or the size of the helmet. It’s because Haro’s hands are shaking too badly. He’s seen that kind of shake before. The sort that comes from the wait and the fear. From being lined up in the muster yard and listening to the commissar talk that way. From knowing that your place on the line used to belong to someone else and that you’re only filling it because they’re ashes. It’s different to the shake that he’s trying to hide. The one that goes right to his marrow that tells him he needs to dose soon.

  Mists and moors, how he needs to dose.

  ‘Hey, void-born,’ Wyck says.

  Her eyes snap over to him and she drops her hands.

  ‘Sir,’ she says.

  ‘Take a breath,’ he tells her. ‘A proper one. Count it out slow.’

  He sees her frown, but then she does as she’s told, and her hands stop shaking quite so badly. She finally manages to get that clasp closed and then opens her mouth as if to say something. Probably thank you.

  ‘Don’t,’ Wyck says. ‘Just do me a favour and keep breathing.’

  He walks away from her to check on the others and Crys stops him. A laugh rolls up from her chest like thunder.

  ‘Inspirational words, sarge,’ she says. ‘Poetry.’

  Crys is kitted up with all of her demolitions gear. It makes her even bigger than she already is. Awd would usually laugh at something like that, but he doesn’t today. His eyes are sombre above his burned-on grin.

  ‘You want poetry, then you can go and join Koy’s Mistvypers,’ Wyck says. ‘She can play that lute of hers for you.’

  Crys snorts another laugh and thumps him on the shoulder. It sends Wyck’s arm a little numb and makes his already aching head ring like a bell.

  ‘They’ll do alright,’ she says, dropping her voice. ‘The void-born.’

  Wyck looks back to Haro and Jey. They are with Tian. He’s having them paint thumb stripes on their faces with oil paint from a tin. Wyck can’t help thinking about what Zane showed him. The black slick water.

  Knives at his back.

  Something worse than death.

  He shakes his head and it makes his vision swim.

  ‘It’s you that bothers me, sir,’ Crys says. ‘You don’t look right.’

  Wyck frowns at her. ‘What?’

  ‘That nosebleed, for one,’ Crys says.

  Wyck puts his hand to his face and sees she’s right. He tastes it then too. Wonders how long he’s been bleeding.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he says, like he would an order.

  Crys purses her lips at him like she wants to ask again, but she doesn’t. She never does, when he pulls that tone with her. The rest of the regiment are all moving around them to deploy behind the Fyregiants. Wyck hears the tank squadron’s engines all kick in as one.

  More thunder.

  More headache.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Wyck shouts to his Wyldfolk.

  He catches Nuria Lye looking at him as they move up to follow the tanks into the city. She scowls and shakes her head at the sight of him, before turning away.

  Crys whistles, low. ‘What did you do to earn that kind of scowl?’ she asks. ‘Ask her for a midnight dance?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Awd says. ‘What did you do?’

  Wyck knows he’s not just asking about Lye. That Awd suspects something is up. He’s always known one of them would figure out about his dosing eventually. He always thought it might be Awd. Wyck has thought some nights about what that would mean, and whether he could kill Awd, if he had to. But it’s as he told the witch, it’s not about whether he could do it. That part he knows for sure. He’s quicker than Awd, and much more vicious.

  The problem is that Wyck’s not sure he could live with it afterwards.

  Wyck runs the sleeve of his fatigues under his bleeding nose, leaving a red stripe against the green and grey.

  ‘A midnight dance,’ Wyck says. ‘No. If I’d have asked Lye for that then I’d be dead.’

  Crys laughs loudly at that. Awd doesn’t.

  ‘Maybe she would have done us a favour, sarge,’ Crys says, oblivious. Her grin is bright and wicked. ‘Then we’d finally get a proper speech before a fight.’

  For the second time, Wyck realises he’s being watched, only this time it’s not by Lye. It’s much worse than that.

  It’s the commissar.

  Raine materialises from amongst his kin like a rogue shadow.

  ‘We will be first through the breach,’ Raine says. ‘Your squad will run the edge.’

  Wyck becomes very conscious of the way his nose is still bleeding, sluggish. He slings his rifle and makes the sign of the aquila.

  ‘The edge,’ he says. ‘Aye, commissar. It’s what He made us for.’

  Raine doesn’t blink, but her dark eyes narrow just a fraction. The wind catches her greatcoat. Water beads on the material, and drips from the brim of her peaked hat.

  ‘In His name,’ Raine says.

  Wyck nods. ‘In His name,’ he says, carefully. Levelly.

  Wyck has occasionally wondered, just like with Awd, if he could kill Raine, should he need to. Looking at her then, at the black depths of her eyes, he more than knows the answer.

  Not a damned chance.

  Cassia Tyl runs up the Valkyrie gunship’s ramp. The thrusters are already firing, loud and hot, cooking the rain right out of the air. Tyl smells burning and fuel and beneath all that, the close press of thunderstorms. Electric. It feels heavy, and in that moment, so does she.

  Myre and Jeth are already on board, armed and armoured, ready to go. Their red-lensed faces turn to look at her.

  ‘Where’s the captain?’ Jeth asks.

  ‘Going solo,’ Tyl says. ‘Something important.’

  Jeth shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s not how this works. We go together.’

  ‘Not today,’ Tyl says. ‘Today I’m in charge, and we’re a three.’

  Jeth bows his head, but he has the look of a threatened animal about him. All tension.

  ‘We may
be a three, but the captain’s a one,’ Myre says, in her downturned voice. ‘He’s alone in whatever he is doing, and you know what they say about lone hounds.’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ Jeth says. ‘You know better than to tempt fate like that.’

  Tyl knows that is where the heaviness is really coming from. It’s not so much the fact that they are going without Fel as it is that he’s acting alone.

  That, and the fact that he wouldn’t tell her why.

  ‘He has a duty to do and so do we,’ Tyl says. ‘And that’s all. We stay balanced and watch careful, like he said.’

  Jeth and Myre both nod their heads. Tyl thumbs the vox-link on the wall.

  ‘We are a go,’ she says.

  ‘Right you are,’ says the pilot, Jova, from the cockpit.

  Tyl looks out as the ramp closes and her view of the muster ground narrows to a thin line and then nothing at all. She pulls on her mask and everything gets washed in red. In one corner she sees Myre’s heart rate and Jeth’s. They are both steady and patient, because they are built to be calm, even when they are just a three and not a five. Even when their captain is hiding something from them. Usually Tyl would be able to see Fel’s life signs, too, but not today.

  Because it only works when they are close.

  Andren Fel looks at the schematic of the Munitorum complex that Raine gave him. It is a big place. A warren of corridors and records halls. Circles within circles, to the centre, where the most dangerous data is kept. The most high risk. He puts out his hand and traces the shapes of the chambers and corridors with his fingers. The ventilation systems and the switchbacks. Lefts and rights and dead ends. He makes landmarks out of some of it and patterns out of the rest. The act of memorising the map is calming, in a way. It helps him forget what it is that he is doing, when you look at it in abstract. Abandoning his kin. His duty.

  Even though the choice was right, what he is doing is desertion.

  Fel lets out a slow breath. The schematic is crumpled in his fist. He folds it into squares and proceeds to tear it into shreds, before closing his eyes for a moment. The Taurox is slowing. He can hear it in the way of the engine and the snarl of the tracks.

  ‘We are close,’ comes Curtz’s voice from the cab.

  Raine told the cadet very little, and Fel has told him nothing else. It’s as much about trust as it is the fact that Fel doesn’t want to see Curtz die like Tula. Dishonoured.

  The Taurox grinds to a stop, and Fel gets up and out, into the shadow of a tall building hung with tattered, rain-soaked pennants. This district of the secondary city has been broken and remade in war’s shape. The buildings are pockmarked and strung with razor wire and the roads are cracked and flooded and marked with dirt from tracks and treads.

  ‘That will be all?’ Curtz asks.

  The cadet looks worn thin. His knuckles are split as if he has been fighting.

  ‘That’s all,’ Fel says, and he turns to go.

  Curtz nods, then he frowns. ‘Commissar Raine told me that the Rifles have a tradition,’ he says. ‘Of speaking words for the honoured dead.’

  Fel shouldn’t, but he nods.

  ‘And what about the others?’ Curtz asks. ‘The ones who have had their honour stripped away?’

  Fel tries to see deceit in the cadet, but all he can find is rage.

  That, and grief.

  ‘All go on to be judged,’ Fel says. ‘And the Emperor alone knows the truth of a heart, honoured or not.’

  Curtz nods slowly. ‘He does,’ he says. ‘Of course He does.’

  Then he shakes his head as if to clear it, and gets back into the Taurox without another word. Fel watches the transport go, tracks churning, and once it is well out of sight, he moves off into the crooked paths behind the buildings.

  The approach to the Sanctum of Bones is a wide avenue, lined on either side by partially collapsed habs and manufactoria. Everything is jagged, grey and ugly, shot through with snapped rebar that reminds Ely Kolat of broken bones. Small arms fire rings off Stoneking’s skin from the buildings on either side of the avenue where the Sighted have dug themselves in like wood larvae. Kolat ignores it, watching through the lens of his targeter as the Sanctum of Bones grows closer. The Sighted are manning barricades outside the spire, despite the blast plating locking it down. The heretics have scrawled their bloody, hateful sigils all across the metal as if it’ll offer them protection from the Fyregiants. As if anything can. Five other Demolishers roll alongside Stoneking. Two on either side, and then Mountainsong in front, like always. Quite a way in front this time, because Chori is damned impatient to get to breaking. Behind them, Hale’s Grey Company follow in columns on foot, protected by the bulk of the Fyregiants. Kolat can’t see them, but he knows they are there. He has spent so long inside the Demolisher that he’s come to appreciate the value of a narrowed view. Just seeing the threat. The target. Nothing more.

  ‘Five hundred metres to range,’ he says.

  ‘Cannon’s up and waiting,’ says Curi in his slow, lazy voice.

  The loader isn’t especially clever, but that suits Kolat just fine. He only needs him to do his job, and nothing else. He doesn’t need another soul like Edra.

  Edra, who had been clever enough to notice the extra tickets and trade-coins Kolat had managed to hoard and wondered how. Who had then been naïve enough to ask him about it instead of just reporting it, and trusting enough to turn his back when Kolat promised him he’d stop shifting stimms and go straight.

  Edra, who had been tougher than he’d expected, and taken quite a bit of killing.

  ‘Hold speed,’ Frayn says, from behind Kolat. ‘We can’t get ahead of the troops. Much as I’d like to.’

  The tank commander might be a sight more clever than Curi, but Frayn isn’t a threat to Kolat’s off-duty habits either. She’s so damned pious that every minute she’s not in the tank is spent at prayer, or having holy words inked in any space she’s got left.

  ‘No, sir,’ says Vurn. Kolat can hear the smile in the driver’s voice.

  Stoneking shrugs aside debris from another of the Kavrone’s wrecked Chimeras with her dozerblade. The shell of the transport is still burning. It’s been torn up from the middle outwards to open up like a wyldblossom. Big exit wound. More small arms fire rings against Stoneking. Kolat sees bodies too, for moments at a time, through the framed focus of the targeter. There was a time long ago when the sound of Stoneking’s engines rattled his ears, right down into his throat, but now he finds he misses it when she is quiet.

  He loves hearing her sing, in all of the ways that’s true.

  ‘Sixty seconds,’ he shouts, as the overlay zeroes towards green.

  And then an impact shakes Stoneking, rattling dust and grit from the tank’s frame above Kolat’s head.

  ‘Long-range missile fire,’ Vurn says. ‘From the Sanctum’s barricades.’

  Curi laughs, loud over the engine’s roar. ‘That won’t come through,’ he says. ‘They should know better.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Frayn says, and there’s something in her voice. ‘They should.’

  Kolat keeps his eyes on the Sanctum and the avenue and catches sight of another Chimera afire, another with that same big exit wound. From the inside out.

  And he goes cold just the same way.

  ‘Mines,’ he shouts. ‘They’ve mined the avenue!’

  ‘Full stop,’ Frayn yells.

  Kolat hears her shout over the vox to the other Fyregiants and the column behind, but he loses her words to a catastrophic explosion that shakes more than just dirt and dust. Kolat cracks his head off the targeter mount and goes blind for an instant. When his sight comes back it’s narrow by nature. Lidded, because he is dizzy and aching and there’s blood running into his eyes. Stoneking’s engine is still roaring, but differently to before. She’s hurting like he is. Over the noise he can hear Vur
n cursing over and over.

  ‘We’re not dead,’ Kolat slurs.

  ‘No,’ Vurn shouts. ‘But Mountainsong is.’

  Kolat blinks and tries to focus through the targeter. The view is awash with fire and smoke and smears that might be the glassaic or might be his eyes, but when they pull back enough and he blinks enough he sees it. The shell of their sister machine, torn up from the inside. Like a wyldblossom.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ Kolat shouts, twisting in his seat to try and see her. ‘We need a plan.’

  Frayn’s face is a mask of blood, but she’s alive. Awake. She pulls down the vox handset and clicks it live.

  ‘To the hells with a plan,’ she says. ‘What we need are wings.’

  Cassia Tyl looks out from behind the door gunner on the Valkyrie, hanging on to the handhold built into the wall of the troop compartment. The wind howls past as the gunship turns sharply, angling her towards the avenue below. Inside her enclosed helm it just sounds like whispers. She sees the wreckage of the lead Demolisher, burning like a fire for the dead.

  ‘It’s Mountainsong,’ Tyl says, over the Duskhounds’ internal channel. ‘Slain by fire.’

  Jeth curses. Myre says nothing. The Valkyrie screams as it dips below the buildings and into the avenue at speed. The airframe shakes and rattles right down Tyl’s arm. Grey stone and metal rush by and the gunners on their heavy bolter turrets open fire into the buildings on either side of the avenue, though they can’t hope to hit much at such a speed.

  And then the rocket pods fire from under the Valkyrie’s wings.

  Clusters of rockets streak over the top of the rest of Grey Company and the remaining Fyregiants in the avenue, impacting the open ground between the tanks and the Sanctum of Bones in rolling waves and triggering the mines buried under the rockcrete. The explosions happen in quick succession, throwing dirt and chips of stone so high in the air that some of it finds its way into the Valkyrie and clatters off Tyl’s carapace plate. She can’t help but smile.

  ‘Now that is thunder,’ Jeth says. He is at the other side door, braced in it with his hellgun up at his shoulder.