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

by Warhammer 40K

  It was the only weapon left to hand. Scrambling for the flamer, her heart thumping in time with every moment the beast took to bring its heavy blade to bear, Rosenkrantz unleashed the full fury of the weapon on the creature’s meaty legs. Flame roared around its knees and ankles, funnelling up the copper rod skirt and razing whatever hung beneath.

  The ogryn released a baleful moan and let the mighty flense fly out of its fingers and into the forest. Its palms spread instinctively before the inferno in a futile attempt to deflect the stream before its snaggle-fanged jaw snapped forward with the intention of mangling the pilot’s face. Her response was the same. A gout of explosive promethium flayed rough, knotty flesh from the ogryn’s skull. Blaze-blasted knees finally gave and the monstrous abhuman buckled, falling down between the cockpit and the quad.

  Charred, fat fingers locked around the ankle of her flight boot and lugged her across the cool metal, dragging her off the roof. New levels of nauseating fear and panic radiated through Rosencrantz as her body left the hull for the uncertainty of a plummet towards a sterile, broiling grave.

  Suddenly there was a hand where Rosenkrantz had no right to expect one. Five fingers and a thumb bolstered by hydraulic ichor and the aircraft’s power plant reserves. Through the open canopy the flight lieutenant could see Benedict’s straining face, his thin lips curled back even further than usual and his face a whirlpool of rippling tendons and wasted muscle. Conduits and cables erupted from his back as the servitor extended his fixed torso and his reach to accommodate the extra pull inflicted upon the pilot’s body from the flaming dead-weight below.

  Rosenkrantz hung there for what seemed like forever, suspended between the abhuman’s death-grip and Benedict’s programmed desire to keep Vertigo’s skipper alive. In the end it was the buckle that decided it. The metal rings of the flight boot were not designed to withstand such abuse and promptly bent, snapped and slipped free, liberating the pilot’s bare foot and dropping with the burning body below.

  Sliding in through the opening, the Jopallian’s response was swift and merciless. Slipping into the harness and settling the bare ball of her foot amongst the pedals, she fired the struggling engines and yanked the stick back between her thighs.

  Vertigo answered, the sudden demand of the engines clearing the remnants of slime from the intakes and blasting the frosty thrusters back to life. The aircraft rocketed skyward, shattering the surrounding vegetation and throwing the pilot’s head back into her seat. After a short burn the livid pilot slammed on the airbrakes, throwing everyone on board towards the ceiling. Sweeping determined digits across the runes of the ordnance panel, Rosenkrantz armed the hellfires before simply detaching the missiles from both wings. She didn’t bother to fire them.

  They fell silently towards the silicon forest before impacting on the planet surface and cleansing the vicinity directly below the aircraft in a superheated tsunami of destructive power.

  As the rumble passed through Vertigo’s superstructure the pilot flicked the vox and opened a channel to the troop bay.

  ‘Status.’

  ‘Where’s the chief?’ Spreckels came back at her.

  Rosenkrantz paused, momentarily reliving the horror of Nauls’s death. ‘Chief’s gone. Status?’

  ‘Osric?’

  ‘Status?’ Rosenkrantz commanded.

  The vox crackled for a few empty seconds, then there came a resigned ‘Bay secure’ from the gunner.

  Rosenkrantz looked back at her servitor co-pilot. Benedict was a lifeless husk, his chest barely rising from the interface seat into which he’d resettled. The cockpit floor was black with his lifeblood both organic and automatronic.

  The lieutenant returned her attention to the aircraft’s controls and the lethal deathworld beyond the armaplas of the Spectre’s canopy.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ she finally decided and blasted for the horizon.

  IV

  Krieg could swear the floor was moving.

  A firm hand smacked his face, jarring him to consciousness. The blackness evaporated, leaving the indelible smudge of two dark shapes hovering in front of his aching eyes.

  ‘Sir?’ came a voice he didn’t recognise. ‘Commissar?’

  Suddenly everything became painfully clear. They were battered and bloody – but they were Guardsmen. Dust cloaks and dungaree jackets marked them out as Spetzghastian Mercantile Militia, as well as their cheap, assembly-line equipment and perpetual understack squints. The figure speaking to him was a whelp of an officer, with green eyes and flaxen hair. Beside him squatted a hard-faced PDF sergeant with one milky-white eye, the Mercantile Militia’s Libra-style insignia sat below his thick shoulder stripes and his name: Endo. Behind them both was a merciless row of bars – probably of a cage or cell.

  ‘Sir?’ the officer persisted.

  ‘Where are we?’ Krieg croaked. He tried to move under the filthy blanket: thought better of it. The officer graciously deferred to the sergeant’s experience.

  ‘Ork rok,’ the Spetzghastian confirmed, his voice as hard as his face.

  Krieg rolled with the information, his mind whirling with the dark possibilities it presented.

  ‘The whole system’s got to be swarming with greenskins.’

  They both nodded gravely. As his eyes accustomed further to the gloom, Krieg could make out possibly ten or twelve other Guardsmen, sitting miserably around the walls of the crude cell. ‘Mission?’ the cadet-commissar managed.

  ‘Recruiting party: abhuman auxilia,’ the young officer added, almost suspiciously. He made a casual salute. ‘Bastian Qvist. Commander, Departmento Munitorum.’

  Krieg took in his grim surroundings. The chamber was an irregular space with walls, floor and ceiling of raw extraterrestrial rock, cut in half by a row of thick bars, probably ripped from the hull of some junker spacecraft. On the far side of the cell chamber, out of ear-shot, a greenskin sentry occasionally fixed them with two glazed, bloody red beads.

  The cell rocked with sudden violence, knocking the sergeant from his crouch and forcing some of the Guardsmen to grab for the bars. The muffled thunder of explosions found their way through the labyrinth of rough-hewn rock passages and bounced around the chamber.

  ‘What the…?’

  ‘We were going to ask you,’ the commander put to him.

  ‘We’re definitely going down,’ a cut-lipped woman in a shabby Mercantile Militia uniform called from behind.

  ‘You here alone?’ Qvist asked with an unmistakable hint of incredulity. Krieg wouldn’t have minded – had it not been the truth – but he could hardly tell them that. Krieg knew what the rock-smothered din outside meant.

  ‘Storm troop: Redemption Corps,’ he told them finally.

  The reaction was instantaneous: a wave of relief and premature jubilation crashed through the group, with the whippersnapper commander slapping aside the sergeant’s shoulder with warm aggression.

  ‘I told you.’

  The sergeant nodded coolly.

  Another stomach-dropping jolt cut their bleak merriment short as the floor simply left them and came to a crashing halt a metre and a half below their feet. Krieg hit the uneven rock floor with a bone-aching smack and moaned gently in quiet torture.

  Despite the initial shock of the plunge the Militiamen were swiftly back on their feet. Cries of alien alarm and thuggish panic filled the access corridor outside. The cantilever bulkhead leading into the cell chamber was ajar, clearing the floor by a bayonet’s length and allowing the Guardsmen a view of the stampede of boots crashing past the doorway outside. The cell chamber suddenly became swathed in steam and this was enough to rouse even the attention of their half-fanged jailer. The warty, bottle-green man-eater had been filing its remaining tusk to a cruel point and picking meat out of the gaps in its monstrous teeth with grubby claws. The clamour outside the door had barely raised one of his wiry eyebrows –
orks given as they were to regular brawls and slaying, even amongst their own kind – but the sudden mist and foaming sheet of chemical brume that washed in under the bulkhead was enough to galvanise even it to action.

  Sweeping up its rough-and-ready shooter from where it hung on a gory strap of plaited human scalp, the jailer loped past the alarmed calls of the Spetzghastians towards the door. It silenced the Guardsmen with one stab of the bolter barrel, driving them several steps away from the bars, before approaching the bulkhead.

  The steaming flood receded as quickly as it had entered. It seemed the ork rok was succumbing to the supercooled flood plain, sinking deeper into the silicon swamp and flooding as it did. Undoubtedly it was being helped to its doom by the explosions outside.

  The greenskin brute followed the retreating waters, yanking up the cantilever door on its rollers and sticking its snaggle-toothed maw out into the corridor. As the door seesawed, a body dropped from the roof door space and hit the cell chamber floor with practiced fluidity, rolling across one carapace shoulder and righting in a combat stance. With one knee to the ground and a hellgun up and aimed squarely at the door, the storm-trooper waited for the greenskin warder to turn and re-enter.

  Krieg and his cellmates watched with eager anticipation as the storm-trooper blasted the monster with a disciplined staccato of supercharged las-fire. The thuggish alien was flung back into the corridor, slamming into the rough-hewn wall. Dropping its weapon it put up two meaty, green palms that soaked up the last few bolts. The storm-trooper clearly expected the beast to drop and halted his fire: it was standard practice for specialist troops – power had to be conserved and was reserved largely for precision kills and suppression.

  The alien monster smouldered in the corridor before blasting away from the wall and out of the smoke at the lone storm-trooper. A green blitzkrieg of savagery, the ork charged like an enraged grox, surging across the cell chamber with shocking speed. The storm-trooper hammered the monster’s barrel-body with another tidy stream of fire before the creature acquired him. Backhanding the hellgun aside with animal rage the ork sank its filthy claws into the storm-trooper’s torso carapace. Lifting him off his boots, the greenskin ran the trooper into the opposite wall, drawing an audible, lung-emptying gasp from the soldier. Holding him there with one brute fist the jailer proceeded to beat the storm-trooper to death with the other.

  Like a rag doll the monster beat him this way and that, one particularly savage blow finding its mark and knocking the helmet across the chamber. Slamming the storm-trooper’s body back and forth between the craggy wall and the unforgiving bars of the cells the greenskin eventually settled on throttling the soldier against the crooked metal.

  Krieg leaned forward. Even from the back, the shaven skull of the storm-trooper was easy to identify as Mortensen’s, with its grim numerals and scarring. Incredibly, the cadet-commissar marvelled, the Gomorrian must have slipped into the rok, spilling blood only when he had to – and then as silently and surreptitiously as possible.

  There was nothing surreptitious about the way Mortensen buried his storm blade into the back of the ork’s bald, green head. The beast blinked and its sadistic features froze as the major’s survival knife squirmed around in the monster’s brain. Taking full advantage of the creature’s bewilderment, Mortensen used the handle of the weapon to haul himself up on the greenskin’s hunched shoulders and slam the serrated blade straight down into the sinew of its muscular neck.

  The jailer’s crushing grip on the storm-trooper suddenly intensified, its great brawny arms encircling the Gomorrian in a crushing bear hug. As the desperate melee continued, with Mortensen and the monster smashing each other against the cell, the grip of the major’s side arm played a messy tune on the jagged bars. Up until this point, Krieg had kicked painfully back into one darkened corner, out of sight: he would have a hard time explaining to the major how he came to be incarcerated on board the ork rok. Qvist’s slender hand slipped through the bars eagerly for the weapon, but Krieg managed to lay his frostbitten fingers on it first, yanking it free of the storm-trooper’s belt holster.

  ‘Not yet,’ he told the officer solemnly. Krieg didn’t exactly know why he’d gone for the weapon. Instinct, he supposed. The Departmento Munitorum officer would in all likelihood have emptied the clip at the ork brute, but the commissar realised that they could ill afford to attract any more attention to the cell-block. On the other hand, it was possible that Krieg had claimed the weapon merely to deny the major an easy rescue. It was tempting to consider Krieg’s mission all but completed at the hands of some alien thug. At the very least the commissar needed Mortensen alive to open the cell door. If nothing else, the major would have spent himself in the battle with the greenskin and, if it came to it, made himself an easier target for the cadet, who wasn’t exactly in the peak of fitness himself.

  The Redemption Corps major had other things on his mind at that moment, tearing his knife back across the ork’s throat and severing both its windpipe and jugular. Something like a survival instinct, embedded deep inside the creature’s primitive brain, gave and the greenskin got to the weapon first. To the great relief of the storm-trooper the ork released its grip on the carapace and wrapped its meaty claws around the handle of the embedded storm blade. With his weapon torn free of its knotted neck, Mortensen was forced to cling onto the patchwork flak and ringmail adorning the greenskin’s back as the ork clutched for him.

  After several near misses, with Mortensen’s head almost finding its way into the greenskin’s vice-like grip, the major finally got a better hold on the wild beast. Krieg flinched as the major struck the bars with unforgiving force. Stripped of the kind of weapons likely to stop an ork in its tracks, Mortensen was using the only resource left to him: brute strength. Somehow he’d snaked his bulging arms around the greenskin’s gushing throat and was squeezing for all he was worth.

  The ork was clawing at the storm-trooper’s arms and throwing itself into the rocky walls and the bars of the cell. Krieg could hear the major’s ragged sighs as each impact increased in power and determination. It was gruesome to watch – Mortensen broken up against every hard edge and sharp corner in the chamber – but still the Gomorrian held on, denying his opponent vital oxygen. Finally, like some wounded beast of the plains, the ork staggered to its knees, clasping the bars with both hands – only to be lashed at and stamped upon by militia issue combat boots.

  When the creature was still, and he was sure it was down, Mortensen unsaddled himself and reached for his storm blade, swiftly finishing what he had started and leaking the unconscious greenskin’s life all over the rough-hewn floor. There was little in the way of Spetzghastian euphoria: freedom was close and the Mercantile Militiamen stood there in desperate expectation.

  The key was a simple barrel turner and was shaped like a pronged tuning fork. With guidance from the militia sergeant, Mortensen found it hanging around the jailer’s neck on a wire cord. Swinging the cell door open, the bruised and beaten Mortensen took in the rag tag band of Guardsmen.

  ‘Commander Qvist?’

  ‘Me, sir,’ the recruitment officer said, stepping forward and offering his hand.

  Mortensen didn’t take it.

  ‘Right, listen up,’ the storm-trooper announced, addressing the entire cell. ‘My name is Major Zane Mortensen: the Redemption Corps storm-troopers will be your rescuers today. Don’t go losing your heads, though. We’re not out of the woods here yet by a long shot.’ The flint-faced sergeant nodded quietly. ‘The escape route is simple: follow this corridor and turn left. Then just follow the bodies.’ Mortensen entered the cell and began helping the wounded militiamen to their unsteady feet. ‘My men have organised some preoccupations for our greenskin friends, so you shouldn’t encounter much in the way of resistance. My corpsmen will be waiting outside with medical supplies, weapons and fresh ammunition. Be ready to give as good as you get. Go!’

  The Spetz
ghastians responded immediately, stomping and hobbling for the cantilever bulkhead. As Mortensen helped the cut-lipped Spetzghastian to the cell door, Commander Qvist went to pick up the greenskin’s abandoned shooter.

  ‘Leave it,’ the major commanded. The young officer hovered over the weapon. Krieg watched Mortensen approach and slunk into the farthest, darkest corner of the cell. He stopped, vaguely annoyed. ‘You won’t be able to aim the damn thing and most probably, it’ll blow up in your hands. That junk only works for the greenskins.’

  Still Krieg hadn’t moved. ‘What’s with him?’ Mortensen asked, surprised that the prospect of freedom hadn’t put a spring in the figure’s step.

  Qvist stood with the major at the doorway, confused. ‘I thought he was one of yours.’

  The major squinted. Krieg came out from behind the filthy blanket. So did the autopistol.

  ‘Krieg?’ Mortensen hissed in disbelief. Qvist’s young face creased in further perplexity.

  The cadet-commissar levelled the weapon at the Gomorrian. Diamanta Santhonax’s commands cutting through the confusion in his heart.

  ‘Major Mortensen: you are charged with one hundred and five Tactica violations – edicts epsilon through alpha – sixteen counts of confederacy, martial treason and sedition of the creed and finally contravention of Stoltz Ultimatum.’ Krieg let his words hang in the bleakness of the cell. ‘Which is punishable by death.’

  Mortensen just stood there, arms and neck pulsing with the tension of the situation. His eyes burned back into Krieg’s own unflinching orbs.

  ‘Best save a couple of slugs for yourself,’ the major recommended coldly. ‘Because once you’re back in the world, your life won’t be worth spit.’

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ Krieg assured him. The commissar suddenly felt the ghostly sensation of a weapon being pointed at him. Without taking the autopistol off the major, he gave the Militia commander austere eyes. And found himself staring up the short barrel of a laspistol. Endo had returned from the greenskin’s grotto where the Spetzghastian rifles had been scavenged and stored. He clutched his own lasgun to his chest and looked on in horror as his commander committed career suicide with his own reclaimed side arm.