by Ben Counter
People were running in every direction. Some were screaming. Orfos made out the face scarves of the attackers on a few and he snapped shots at them, uncertain if he hit them. The Chimera’s engine was starting and Scout Geryius was manipulating the vehicle’s mounted heavy stubber into position.
‘Vengeance upon you!’ yelled Geryius, and opened up with the heavy stubber. The hammering of the weapon drowned out the sound of panic and one of the shanties disintegrated, taking the gunman inside with it. Geryius panned the weapon around, shredding an alleyway between the shanties where two of the enemy had fled.
Orfos recognised the silhouette of a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher on the roof of a hab-block opposite. A rocket spiralled down before he could react, missing the Chimera by a metre or so and ripping a great explosion of dust and debris out of the mass of makeshift housing. Orfos sighted through the dust and shot the enemy down before he could reload. The body fell, and Orfos could see it wore the coveralls of a foundry worker, the same as thousands of the refugees in the Emperor’s Embrace.
Geryius fired another burst into the people wandering dazed from the explosion. Some had guns in their hands and their faces covered. Some did not.
‘Cease fire!’ yelled Orfos. ‘Geryius, cease fire!’ He sprinted from the doorway and vaulted up into the Chimera’s passenger compartment.
‘See?’ said the driver. ‘They’d all have our bloody heads if they could! All of ’em!’
‘Get us out of here,’ said Orfos.
Gunfire pinged against the vehicle, sporadic and ill-directed. Orfos looked over the edge of the top hatch to see the wounded crawling away with limbs blown off; the dead with torsos or heads ruined. Some were the enemy, without doubt. Some were not. Some, he couldn’t tell.
He could hear the panic and the anger spreading. Like a shockwave, like a virulent disease, it was rippling out through the Emperor’s Embrace. The dead here would become martyrs in the minds of everyone who believed the Imperium were here to destroy and enslave. The guns in the hands of the enemy would become proof to the Imperial forces that the Emperor’s Embrace was infested with heretics.
And the King of Crows?
Orfos would keep that to himself.
K-Day +4 Days
Subjugation of traitor activity in the Emperor’s Embrace refugee camp
Orfos watched from the hab-block rooftop at the train of plague victims shambling through the winding, cramped streets. They waded through makeshift open sewers and piles of trash, past stacks of bodies and burning piles of refuse.
The refugees made the signs of some native superstition as they passed, calling to be protected against the disease carried by the procession of the damned. The damned themselves were shrouded in grave vestments taken from the few refugees to have been given a proper burial, stained with corpse liquor, their feet bound with rags and their faces covered in hoods with nothing but torn eyeholes for features. About twenty of them were making their way through the camp, picking up new members as they went, seeking somewhere out of the way and uninhabited to die.
The disease rotted the insides, leaving organs a foul decaying mush.
And it left the lungs a heaving, pulpy mass full of writhing worms.
And it shrivelled the brain. And caused the spine to heat up and burn out through the victim’s back. It drove them mad, too, and catatonic, all at once.
The disease itself had been the clue. Everyone knew what it did, but everyone knew something different. Each man and woman ascribed to the disease whatever fate they themselves feared most. If they feared going mad, that was how the plague killed. If they were religious, it was a moral disease that took hold through impure thoughts and killed by mimicking the wounds of saints. If they had family and friends, then the disease spread like a fire between close-knit groups.
There was no one truth, no one consistency. That was what had suggested to Orfos there was no disease. Or rather, there was no plague. There were plenty of diseases brought about by inadequate water supply and cramped living conditions, but those were all the same. They could be described and even treated, by medicae officers accompanied by units of Imperial Guard who watched the camp’s population through the sights of a lasgun. But the plague was different. The plague was a fiction.
Orfos rolled to the edge of the hab-block roof, keeping his cameleoline cloak wrapped around him. He could see now the path the plague victim procession was taking – towards the north-western corner of the camp, in a winding path that kept them away from the guard towers manned by Imperial Guard snipers, and through the concentrations of the most hostile refugees. The belief that the plague was a deliberate Imperial creation was widespread and the procession was viewed as a display of martyrdom by those refugees who hated the Imperium, a fact which did more than anything to keep Imperial scrutiny away from these shambling, doomed figures.
Orfos knew that he could not be completely invisible. He hid when he could, and when he could not, he went by night and let his silhouette stand out against the night sky. The people believed that an Imperial killer was stalking through them, eliminating those who spoke out against the Imperium. Orfos was certain he had been assumed the perpetrator of countless deaths and murders in the camp already. It was a legend that suited him. As long as he kept a distance between himself and the procession, the fiction was useful because it meant no one would approach him. People fled into their houses and murmured prayers of protection, and would not interfere.
If the plague was an invention, why had it been invented? Were these two dozen people, who were now trudging through pools of fuel-tainted mud, making their miserable journey to maintain the illusion that the Imperium had infected them? No. Some of them were genuine victims of disease who had joined the procession as it went, but Orfos had kept a count and noted that those who joined soon disappeared, vanishing in the shadows of the darkest streets, and the same core of plague victims continued. For such a deadly disease, the Emperor’s Embrace plague did not seem to have killed those who had been walking with it for two days. The plague story was supposed to keep people away, to ensure safe passage through the camp, and to provide an excuse to shield the walkers’ faces.
Orfos would have been willing to wager that the masks did not hide plague scars or hollow, dying eyes. This was how the traitors were moving themselves out of the camp, westwards towards the escape into the mountains that bounded the Battle Plains. No one stopped them, no one got close. Those who joined them suffered unquestioned deaths. The disguise was perfect. This was how the King of Crows was making his way to freedom.
K-Day +7 Days
Encirclement of Rekaba and establishment of air superiority prior to Operation Catullus
The jungle of the Dvolian Coil, like a great sickle of emerald reaching out into a glittering ocean, shone beneath the Sanctifier so brightly it might have been painted. Four hundred kilometres south and an entire ocean away from Khezal, the second front for the battle of Opis was opening up far above the ground, between the wispy clouds and the bright green canopies of the jungle. The Dvolian Coil itself, a long curved peninsula notched with coves and inlets between sheer chasms of granite cliffs, had been the centre of an empire ruled by the Dvolian Navarchs. Once they had vied with Khezal for domination of the planet. The Coil and the city that served it, the metropolis of Rekaba, were home to ancient martial traditions that had never died even when the Dvolian Empire fell. For centuries the Navarchs, now absorbed into the structure of the Aristeia, had maintained their fleets and splendid armies as they had always done. Now the silken-sailed warships and grand parades were mostly for show, but that naval prowess had developed into a mastery of flight and aerial warfare that the Aristeia had encouraged.
The fruits of that obsession, first with the sea and now with the sky, streaked up from a hidden airfield beneath the canopy, lighting up the warning runes in the Sanctifier’s cockpit.
‘Heathen forces, eleven o’clock below us, five kilometres,’ said Kebriones, scanning rapidly through
the various tactical readouts in front of him. ‘Approaching fast. Mach point four.’
‘I see them,’ said Gorgythion calmly.
Five bogies he counted in an instant, and then they were out of view, hurtling past below the Sanctifier. Gorgythion gauged their speed and manoeuvrability as he turned the gunship to get on their tails.
They were small. Fast. Probably much more aerobatic, at least at high speeds, than the gunship. In the brief glimpse he had they looked like single-seater fighters, probably dedicated interceptors with a loadout of cannon and air-to-air missiles.
‘Dangerous in swarms,’ he said.
‘Does five count as a swarm?’ asked Kebriones, barely registering the conversation as he ran through the many tactical views developing on his pict-screens.
‘Not quite,’ replied Gorgythion.
The enemy were still in formation, arcing upwards and turning as they did so, showing the shining purple and white of their upper hull designs. There was little need, evidently, to camouflage the fighters on the ground when they had the cover of the jungle canopy. Instead they proudly wore the colours of their squadron or of the noble house that paid for them, just as the Sanctifier wore the heraldry of the Imperial Fists.
‘Apex on my mark,’ said Kebriones.
Gorgythion aimed the Sanctifier down, as if to dive low and skim along the canopy. He wanted the enemy to think he was running. He wanted them to be grinning behind their oxygen masks, wagering one another who would win the ensuing chase.
‘Mark,’ said Kebriones.
At that moment, the enemy reached the apex of their climb and aimed down, diving towards the Sanctifier. Eager to get their name on the kill, they launched their missiles almost as one, as soon as the gunship was in their sights. Lock-ons barely registered before the missile launch warnings blared all over the cockpit. Gorgythion focused on a retinal rune and silenced them.
‘Primus away,’ he said, and flicked an arming and release switch.
One of the fragmentation bombs with which the Sanctifier was loaded dropped out of the weapons bay. Its fuse was short, far too short for safety. But the first lesson Gorgythion had learned in battle was that one does not win a dogfight by being safe.
The bomb exploded in the tree canopy. A great fountain of shredded wood shrapnel burst up in a dark hemisphere just behind the gunship. Suddenly overwhelmed with potential targets, the missiles streaked into the debris cloud and exploded, sharp blue-white bursts of radiation and flame impacting just above the jungle.
In the chaos and heat, the enemy fighters would be blinded. Masked by the smoke and heat radiation, the Sanctifier turned rather more quickly than a fighter could, its slow speed suddenly a virtue.
By the time the fighters passed overhead, Gorgythion’s thumb was ready on the firing stud.
‘Feast, Sanctifier!’ he yelled as the fighters roared past the gunship. They could not see the gunship, but the gunship’s machine-spirit, ancient and cunning, could see them.
The Sanctifier growled with hunger. Gorgythion had to rein it in for a second more, until his vision was full of the blue-white exhaust of the fighters rocketing past.
Gorgythion ordered the launch, and the belly of the Sanctifier blazed with fire. Five missiles burst out of their housings and arrowed upwards, the archeotech of the gunship’s cogitator calculating millions of angles and velocities per second. The interlocking contrails of each missile created a burning spiral in the sky, caging the rearmost fighter even as the first missile ripped up through the rear edge of its right wing and blew it apart.
Explosions stuttered overhead. Three of the fighters were destroyed in the air, creating an expanding caul of burning debris. A fourth missile sheared a chunk out of its target’s tail and the fighter fell away, flipping to one side and tumbling towards the canopy. It plunged through the mantle of leaves and a split second later, a column of fire and black smoke punched back up into the air.
The fifth missile missed. The Sanctifier howled in frustration and its engines leapt. Gorgythion wrestled the yoke back and kept the gunship on the fighter’s tail as it looped back up and away to escape.
‘Do we have the speed?’ said Kebriones.
‘His engine’s flaring,’ replied Gorgythion. ‘He sucked in too much debris.’
The fighter’s exhaust was sputtering, yellow shooting through the blue flame. The pilot was climbing and dropping to keep up airspeed. The Sanctifier followed in a straight line, keeping pace with the faster fighter.
‘Rend, Sanctifier! Bring out your talons!’ Gorgythion switched to the nose-mounted assault cannon and the swinging reticule lit up red on the viewscreen. Gorgythion fired and sprays of silver lashed out towards the enemy.
The enemy pilot was good. He kept the fighter moving in all planes, and only a few shots found their mark. A shower of burning metallic countermeasures sprayed out from the fighter’s weapons bay, the viewscreen shuddering with static as they deflected the mundane sensors of the Sanctifier. But the gunship’s archeotech included sensors that could see through anything the enemy might throw. The coughing of the engines, as Gorgythion forced them to maximum, sounded like a deep, mocking laughter.
Another burst of cannon fire kicked a spatter of black specks from the rear of the fighter. It was already hurt. It would not take much more to destroy it.
Below, the jungle clung to hills and valleys, creating a landscape that rose and fell like the waves of a green ocean. Spurs of rock broke the canopy, curved and gnarled like old fingers, arranged in clutches to form great stone cages. The fighter ducked through one and the Sanctifier whipped to one side to avoid it, buying the enemy pilot a half-second of distance over its pursuer.
Another cannon burst. This one missed, blowing the top knuckle off a stone finger.
One more shot. One more good burst and the enemy would fall.
A lash of blue-white energy whipped up from beneath the jungle canopy. It cut through the fighter, so rapidly it was gone before Gorgythion’s eye could properly register what had happened. The fighter did not explode – it fell apart, bisected at an angle through the centre of its fuselage, spilling components as the two parts fell as dead weight into the canopy below.
‘What was that?’ said Gorgythion.
‘No bogies in range,’ replied Kebriones. ‘It’s blinded the sensors. The output was massive. It’s an energy weapon.’
‘Damnation, there isn’t anything like that on this planet!’ said Gorgythion, wrenching the Sanctifier around to avoid the area where the fighter had gone down. ‘Must be on the ground,’ said Kebriones.
Gorgythion could see the black tear in the jungle where the weapon had discharged. The trees were burning.
Ahead, columns of crackling blue energy punched up into the sky, pulses of electricity shuddering through the canopy. Half a dozen of them were suddenly burning ahead of the Sanctifier.
‘They’re everywhere,’ said Kebriones. ‘Behind us, too. We’ve flown into the middle of it.’
‘Whatever it is,’ said Gorgythion.
He slalomed the Sanctifier between the pillars of energy. With the sensors still blinded he had to do it all by eye. The runes on the viewscreen were blinking in and out and the instrument readings were spinning haywire. Crackles of power were playing across the surfaces of the cockpit, jumping between the cables overhead. One of the pict-screens in front of Kebriones cracked, spilling sparks over the Imperial Fist.
They were almost out. A few hundred metres further and the energy field ended, giving way to an expanse of jungle and beyond that, the ocean.
The Sanctifier bucked wildly. Air was suddenly shrieking around the cockpit. Gorgythion glanced back and in that fraction of a second noted that the cockpit door had blown out to reveal a huge section at the gunship’s rear torn away. Through the back of the Sanctifier he could see the vivid blue of the sky and the green of the jungle hurtling by.
Gorgythion tested the controls. He still had command, just, though they were slug
gish and feeble.
‘I’m bringing us down!’ he shouted over the howl of the wind.
This time Gorgythion saw the lash of energy coiling up towards him. It sliced just to one side of the gunship and he saw the Sanctifier’s left wing ripped off, tumbling away from the craft. The gunship fell to one side as if rolling off a cliff and the canopy was rushing up towards Gorgythion’s face.
He braced himself. The only thought he had as he fell was that this was the only Shadowhawk in service, and if it was not recovered from the jungle floor, there would never be any more.
The Sanctifier hit the canopy. The last thing Gorgythion saw was a branch spearing through the viewscreen, impaling Kebriones through the throat and exiting through the back of his head.
Then the world spun around him and blackness fell, then Gorgythion felt nothing.
K-Day +11 Days
Operation Catullus
Invasion and capture of Rekaba
Lysander kicked his way through another wall of dry mud and human bones, and in the gloom his enhanced sight picked out walls of skulls staring back at him.
‘I like this not,’ said Brother Stentor.
‘You like nothing,’ replied Brother Beros. It was Beros who had taken up the flamer of the fallen Brother Apollonios, and he held the weapon in front of him now, the flame flickering at its tip. Apollonios’s name was inscribed in the weapon’s casing. Beros’s lightning claw was clamped to the backpack of his armour. ‘The enemy must fight us toe to toe down here. We see him dying! We smell him burning! What is there not to like?’
The catacombs beneath Rekaba were cramped and noisome. They would be close enough for normal soldiers, but the Imperial Fists barely fit crouched over into the corridors lined with burial niches. Miniature chapels at the junctions were decorated with domes of skulls and pillars of femurs, and underfoot the earth gave way into even older graves with bones that disappeared into dust under their armoured feet. Lysander’s fire-team made as good speed as they could through the labyrinth, readings from Sergeant Kirav’s auspex scanner keeping them closing in on their destination.