Honour Imperialis - Braden Campbell & Aaron Dembski-Bowden & Chris Dows & Steve Lyons & Rob Sanders

by Warhammer 40K

  The Cadians never saw the inquisitor’s death. By the time Caius had obeyed the terrible command and plunged his aquila-hilted blade into his own belly, the Guardsmen had opened fire on the daemon.

  ‘Have you come to bring me back into the False Emperor’s light?’ Grotesquely, it spoke with Seth’s voice even though it no longer wore his features, masked as they were under its reformed power armour. ‘To show me my sins in the light of your dead god?’

  Something like that, Thade thought as his broken sword fell in a chop, and a hundred rifles fired in anger.

  All told, the final battle between the survivors of the Cadian 88th Mechanised Infantry and the daemon responsible for the Kathurite Scourge lasted under one minute, yet it cost the lives of forty-six loyal Cadian-born servants of the Throne.

  The volleys of las-fire did almost nothing to the creature, and it rampaged through the bridge, its claws tearing soldiers limb from limb, while it paused only to vomit acid on those too slow or too proud to retreat.

  Thade and Horlarn, both armed with ruined chainswords that sported stilled teeth, ran in to engage the daemon. They were joined by the wounded Ban Jevrian with his malfunctioning and half-snapped power sabre, and twenty men using their pistols and bayonets. With Thade was Rax, leaping at its master’s side.

  This swarm assault also did almost nothing, except cost lives. Horlarn was decapitated by a sweep of the daemon’s claw. Thade was saved from the same fate at the last moment by a grinding metal hand blocking the falling claw’s arc.

  Osiron, his back-mounted powerpack and additional servo-arm sparking as its joints gave way under the pressure, held the creature at bay long enough for Thade to get to his feet again.

  The tech-priest’s last action in the battle was to swing his two-handed axe with all his machine-enhanced strength, ramming it solidly into the daemon’s body. This, at last, did something. The blade bit hard, snagging within the beast’s spine, dropping it to its knees. Its return strike smashed Osiron to the side of the chamber, where he would die several minutes later from blood loss and internal haemorrhaging.

  Renewed las-fire slashed into the prone daemon, every beam now carving its burn lines into the fatty flesh of the thing’s face. Thade came at it from the side, both pistols hammering until their clips ran dry. Rax leapt at the horror, its jaws ripping head-sized chunks of spoiled meat from the beast’s bones.

  It was weakening, but hardly out of the fight, even without the use of its legs.

  ‘Thade!’ Commissar Tionenji cried as he ran at the creature, hacking into its neck with his slender chainblade. His own strike was a distraction, as the sword he’d taken from Inquisitor Caius’s body flashed through the air in Thade’s direction. The captain caught it, reversed it in his hands, and plunged it two-handed into the daemon’s neck. Black blood flowed from a legion of wounds now.

  And it still wouldn’t die.

  There was no glorious final blow, though the soldiers of the 88th – those that survived – would say over the years that it was Thade’s last strike which assuredly saw the daemon dead. The truth was altogether less glorious, and because Taan Darrick was involved, consisted of much more swearing than the saga would say.

  ‘Run, you idiots!’ Darrick cried from his position by the side consoles with the remains of his squad.

  Thade and the others in their desperate melee saw a rain of black incoming, clattering all around.

  Grenades.

  As Thade threw himself aside, his world exploded in light.

  ‘Let this world rot.’ The Herald’s voice was a savage whisper. He still stood at the gates of the monastery, listening as the psychic death scream faded from his sixth sense. ‘I am done with this place.’

  The Death Guard formed around their lord and master, unsure of his meaning.

  ‘We are leaving, Great One?’ a plague-ridden Astartes asked.

  Typhus chuckled. The things living within his windpipe writhed at this rare mistreatment.

  ‘Yes. I have real business to attend to beyond this petty distraction. Tell me, do you remember Brother-Sergeant Arlus?’

  ‘No, lord,’ replied the closest Death Guard.

  ‘Do any of you?’

  ‘I do, lord. I was Brother Menander. I served Arlus in life. We were Seventh Company. He was greatly blessed by the Grandfather when we made war upon Terra.’

  ‘He was. But he squandered his gift. And this shall be the last time I allow the whining of distant fools to distract me from my duty. Come. We return to Terminus Est.’

  ‘And then, lord?’

  ‘And then… to Cadia. Take me to the Warmaster.’

  ‘Medic!’

  Thade knelt by Osiron, flinching back as sparks flared from the tech-priest’s sundered body armour.

  ‘Sir,’ Tasoll looked awkward as he held his narthecium kit, staring down at the torn red robe now revealing an entirely augmetic body. ‘W-what should I do? He’s not even bleeding blood.’

  ‘It… is a synthesised compound…’ Osiron wheezed ‘…of haemolubricant qualities… and…’

  ‘Shut up, you idiot,’ Thade looked at the oily black fluid covering his hands. ‘Just shut up, and tell us what to do!’

  Tech-priest Enginseer Bylam Osiron said nothing more.

  Amongst the stinking fallout and moans of the injured, Commissar Tionenji leaned against the door arch leading from the bridge. He caught his breath away from the men, not willing to let them see how exhausted he was. It was his duty to be inspiring at all times. Not for Commissar Tionenji were the aches and woes of mortal tiredness. The men shouldn’t see such things.

  A smile crossed his lips. He was alive. Life! After all they had witnessed and all they had endured.

  He was a man whose intelligence was both ruthless and restless. Already he planned stratagems for the remains of the regiment to survive on Kathur long enough to greet the main Reclamation forces. The incident with Thade and his command team pulling their weapons on a commissar would have to be addressed, but…

  ‘Hey.’ Ban Jevrian of the Kasrkin limped up to the commissar, his right trouser leg soaked with red. ‘One hell of a fight.’

  ‘Greetings, master sergeant,’ Tionenji grinned – all white teeth set in his dark face. ‘The Emperor smiles on us, I think.’

  ‘Oh, you think?’

  The knife came from nowhere. One moment Jevrian had been leaning against the wall with Tionenji, cradling his broken arm and favouring his bad leg. The next moment, Jevrian’s fist was at the commissar’s ear and his hand-length boot knife was sticking clean through Tionenji’s skull.

  Blood barely even had time to spurt before the commissar dropped to the decking. Jevrian reclaimed his knife several seconds later, wincing as he needed to bend down. His leg really did ache like an army of bastards.

  ‘The Emperor smiles upon me,’ Jevrian raised himself back up, wiping his knife, the blade clearly stamped with the regiment’s insignia, on the sleeve of his fatigues.

  ‘But you? I doubt he’d piss on you if you were on fire.’

  Jevrian returned to the main area. Taan Darrick met his eyes from across the bloody bridge, and the Kasrkin officer nodded once.

  In the earpiece of every soldier still standing, a single vox-click sounded. Several men nodded. Some smiled. Most pretended not to hear it, but only one never knew what it meant.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Thade, tapping his vox-bead.

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ Darrick replied. ‘Just a glitch.’

  Epilogue

  Home

  I

  Twenty-seven days later, the Reclamation fleet arrived in full force.

  The Herald’s fleet was gone – had been gone for weeks – leaving only the faintest echoes in the warp to mark their departure. They left a dead world behind them, marking their failure.

  The first tro
ops to walk the surface encountered fewer threats than the Reclamation’s initial spearhead had faced. Never concerned with reinforcing the world for conquest, no Archenemy vessels arrived to save the heretics of the Remnant and its splinter cults drawn from the treasonous populace. With all global production shut down and off-world imports utterly ceased, the still-living humans of Kathur began to die of thirst and starvation before long. Those that maintained supplies of food and water eked out an existence as territorial warbands until the Imperial Guard’s main force annihilated them completely in what scholars came to know as the ‘True Reclamation’.

  The Guard units arriving at the headquarters of Overseer Maggrig and the fallen regiments he commanded, encountered a fortified base of jury-rigged prefab structures and salvaged tank cannons mounted on scratch built fortress walls.

  As the gates to this rather humble fortress opened, General Millius Rylo of the Hadris Rift 19th descended from his command tank – a pristine Leman Russ Demolisher – and was greeted by a man in ragged Cadian-pattern armour painted black with grey fatigues.

  ‘Welcome to New Solthane,’ said the man with a captain’s stripes on his shoulder. He scratched at a black beard that had been growing for the past few weeks at least. Water rations apparently hadn’t allowed for luxuries like shaving. ‘I sincerely hope you’ve brought us some ammunition.’

  The man next to him, equally filthy, raised his hand.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to some food, either.’

  ‘Shut up, Taan,’ the captain said.

  ‘Shutting up, sir.’

  The general observed these scruffy examples of Guard discipline, clearly less than thrilled at the sight before his eyes.

  ‘You look like death, both of you,’ he said, his lip curling. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The captain – and the men joining him from the buildings around – all stank to high heaven.

  Evidently bathing hadn’t been on the cards, either.

  II

  My Lord Castellan,

  I recommend First Lieutenant Parmenion Thade for the highest citation in our world’s defence. Despite grievous injury and a shattered chain of command, he assumed leadership of Shock and Interior Guard forces stationed in the recent retreat at Kasr Vallock, arranging for the evacuation of seventy-one per cent of citizenry even as the fortress-city fell. All survivors bolstered the defences at nearby Kasrs, including the wounded governor-militant and his family.

  I also have reports from over fifty eyewitnesses that First Lieutenant Thade duelled and slew a Traitor Astartes of the Thousand Sons Legion with the assistance of his command platoon.

  As a final note, I offer the eyewitness reports listed in the attached file, listing Mechanicum personnel who will testify to the destruction of the enemy Titan (Reaver-class) designated ‘Syntagma’ at the fall of Kasr Vallock. Thade’s sappers and tech-priest contingent were responsible for the overloaded generatoria within the city’s industrial sector that led to the Syntagma’s immobilisation. The following deployment of Interior Guard and Shock forces storming the crippled Titan resulted in the war machine’s destruction.

  Creed, I heard about the new medals. Give one to Thade. Too many are being given posthumously, and we’ve little to be proud of since the Despoiler set foot on Home. He deserves this, and with the losses sustained to our regiment, I’m making him a captain immediately.

  We will march together again, Lord Castellan, under Cadian skies. Until that day, may the God-Emperor watch over you.

  Colonel Josuan Lockwood

  Cadian 88th Mechanised Infantry

  III

  Thade lowered the dataslate.

  He’d never read his citation before, and Colonel Lockwood’s words to Lord Castellan Creed sat uncomfortably in his mind. Melancholy at the disaster of Kathur months ago mixed with the bitterness of Kasr Vallock still less than a year before. It had always seemed ridiculous to him – earning a medal and a priceless sword for the first time in his life he’d ever had to run from a battle. The first battle he’d ever lost. In failure, he was rewarded. Promoted, even.

  He’d told Lockwood the truth once. The truth behind Kasr Vallock.

  ‘I wanted to stand and fight,’ he’d said. ‘It was Osiron who talked me down, gave me a long speech about fighting the good fight when it counted most for Cadia and not when it counted for my pride.’ He’d clenched his fists; one familiar and warm, the other – freshly implanted – unfamiliar, still numb to most sensation beyond a sense of aching cold.

  ‘Throne, I wanted to die there. It was home. We left our own home to burn. Now we’re being shipped off-world while the enemy pisses on the rubble of the city where we were born.’

  ‘Stop whining, Thade,’ the colonel had said. ‘Slap a smile on your miserable face tomorrow when the Lord Castellan gives you that sword, and get over yourself. We’re all hurting. Half of Home has fallen, son. Cadian Blood, eh? Ice in your veins.’

  Thade had chuckled then, and forced a smile. Lockwood was right, of course. He’d always had that damnable ability and Thade admired him for it.

  ‘You win.’

  ‘Of course I do. You gave the Warmaster one hell of a black eye, and you’ve every right to be proud instead of wallowing in this self-pitying nonsense I’m seeing right now. But shake Creed’s hand at the ceremony tomorrow and remember: this isn’t all for you, you selfish bastard. It’s for the Eighty-eighth. The men need some inspiration to take with them after all this. Home still needs a lot of our sweat before it’s all ours again.’

  Thade drifted back to the present, feeling the shiver of the ship around him.

  ‘Colonel?’ asked a voice nearby. Thade looked out of the porthole, comfortable in the flight seat, staring out into the void of space. The troop carrier Infinite Faith rumbled onward, and a planet slowly hove into view. A planet of blue oceans and silver cities, a planet that Thade knew better than any other, ringed by a colossal war fleet that looked like twinkling stars from this distance.

  ‘Colonel?’ Darrick repeated. Thade turned his head.

  ‘That’s “warden-colonel” to you.’ He grinned and turned back to the window, looking out at the planet as they slowly drew closer. The night side of the world showed glints of flame flaring on the surface, like distant candles in the blackness. War, viewed from orbit, had a beauty all its own. Darrick moved around Rax, who sat polished and oiled by his master’s side, and he nodded to the porthole.

  ‘How does Home look, Par?’

  ‘Same as always, Taan.’ He stared at the planet below, watching parts of it burn.

  ‘Unbroken.’

  There were two of them. Women.

  Boots. Bodices. Bodies borne of fire and atonement. Even in the murk of the maximum-security oubliette he could make out the distinctive garb of the battle-sisters. A pair of nimble little penitence engines, come to work off their own sins in the condemnation of others.

  ‘Sisters,’ Mortensen acknowledged across the filthy cell. With poetic synchronicity, coiled power lashes slipped from the sisters’ slender gauntlets and began to crackle and dance on the floor like death-throe serpents. One motioned him to get up. Grunting, he kicked himself away from the soiled wall. As his nakedness passed between their joint four hundred pounds of man-hating flesh, Mortensen enjoyed their loathing. Assuming the supplicating demeanour of a good prisoner, he took a seat at the plasteel table and chair in the centre of the chamber with the light and his visitors.

  A shadow momentarily enveloped the room as a dark shape dropped in through the ceiling threshold. At first Mortensen took it to be a body: perhaps one of his men. Far too elegant for a flailing corpse, the form somersaulted and landed gently in front of the table. Her heavy ribbed cape – like the wings of a gargoyle – parted to reveal livid, black armour and the dazzling reflection of a maze of polished adamantium pins inserted into her bare cranium, each pin a centimetre
equidistant from the others. As she lifted her chin Mortensen found himself fixed in the steely gaze of an older woman, her eyes like the twin barrels of a storm bolter – impassive, unswerving and on target.

  She took him in with the kind of fascination most people reserve for keen blades and caged reptiles: the Guardsman’s physique, the schola tattoos, the erubescent scarring that danced across his muscular flesh like camouflage scalded into the skin. The florid pattern became even more intense across Mortensen’s shaven head and chest, only broken up by the cruciform of numerals inked across his scalp and a short, ragged beard around a snarl that passed for a mouth.

  The interest was reciprocated. It had been an impressive entrance, but at that moment Mortensen found himself admiring the jump pack the battle-sister had used to negotiate the oubliette’s roof threshold and the new possibilities it offered: in a cell with the sole exit situated in the ceiling, the only way out was up.

  Even before he knew what he was doing, Mortensen was on his feet. With the unreal speed and fluidity of a drinking-hole gunslinger, the woman had dipped her hand into a holster and drawn a tapered pistol. There was a brief crack of las-fire and a flash filled the room. The blast hit him square in the centre of his chest, the momentum carrying his knees over his shoulders. The battle-sister’s pistol was back in its holster before Mortensen hit the ground in an untidy, unconscious heap.

  Shrugging the seconds he’d just spent in oblivion from his aching skull, Mortensen grabbed the back of the chair and pulled himself to his feet. Running fingers across his chest he found a shallow scorch mark seared into the flesh above the sternum. The power pack on the sister’s pistol must have been fried. Mortensen’s face split into a grin.