Imperial Glory

by Richard Williams

  Very slowly, Carson toppled backwards. His pistol fell from his hand and thumped onto the ground. Every muscle was clenched and shaking and he could not release it.

  Stanhope stepped towards him and saw the rictus on his face. ‘Carson?’

  ‘Get…’ he managed through clenched teeth, ‘…Red.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Red emerged from Stanhope’s tent, his normally severe face softened a touch.

  ‘Is he up?’ Stanhope asked crisply.

  ‘He’s moving, sir. He’s not on his feet yet.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  Red looked away. ‘It’s not exactly my place, sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the lieutenant.’

  But Stanhope did not relent. ‘I’m asking you, colour-sergeant. In fact, I am ordering you.’

  Red snapped to attention, standing stiff enough to support the whole of Dova, and Stanhope saw defiance blaze in him.

  ‘Axomitic gas,’ Carson said from the flap of Stanhope’s tent. He was in his shirt-sleeves and swaying, but he was upright. ‘And if you have any questions, Mister Stanhope, I’d be obliged if you directed them to me.’

  Red saluted quickly and disappeared, most unsettled at being caught between the two officers, and at the rebellious streak that had emerged in him. Stanhope let him go and followed Carson inside.

  ‘You can walk again?’

  Carson half-sat, half-collapsed on the bed. ‘I find your presence irritating, Stanhope, but not permanently debilitating.’ He gathered his jacket and slowly started to put it on. Stanhope waited for the explanation.

  ‘There’s little to it. It was a Kartha booby-trap, the second week on Kandhar. We got out quickly, but I wasn’t quick enough.’

  ‘We were told axomitic gas was instantly fatal.’

  ‘No, it takes a few seconds. Time enough to use the auto-injector. Did it never strike you as odd?’ Carson asked. ‘We were given myecyclone to inject ourselves with if we were exposed to a gas that was supposed to kill you in a split second?’

  Stanhope nodded gently. ‘It doesn’t normally pay to question orders.’

  ‘It doesn’t pay to follow them blindly either, does it? You know that.’

  Stanhope straightened up, disliking the lieutenant’s inference. ‘And so the myecyclone didn’t work, is that it?’

  ‘No, it worked alright. It’s the cure that’s killing me,’ Carson said.

  Stanhope did not know what to say to that. ‘Only the Guard could issue a remedy that does exactly what the poison does, only takes longer to do it,’ Carson continued. ‘And it won’t be clean; anyone who’s ever lost all control of the lower half of their body can tell you that it isn’t clean. It’s happening more often, each time is longer, spreading further, and soon it will be permanent.’

  ‘How long do you have?’

  Carson pulled his jacket on and started fastening the buttons. ‘Of use? Not long. The medicae said that when it reached this stage, it wouldn’t be long. Until I’m finished completely? They couldn’t say.’

  He stood up off the bed and faced Stanhope eye-to-eye. ‘So now I know your little secret and you know mine. Both of them. I imagine you’re thinking right at this moment whether you should have me removed from command. I think you could. But I think you won’t. Because then you would have to run the company, you’d have to be here for these men. And here is the last place you want to be. You need me and we don’t need you.’

  Carson walked out, leaving Stanhope alone. Stanhope breathed hard, stamped his foot and looked up to the canvas above him and the clouds and the stars above those. Carson was wrong about one thing. The company did need him. They needed to know that there was someone there, not to replace the lieutenant, but to succeed him.

  But Carson was right about him. Stanhope unbuckled his sword from his belt and sat down and began to twist off the base of the hilt, revealing a small compartment. He took a dry leaf from inside and put it in his mouth. He did not wish to be here. The men of the company needed someone, but it did not need to be him.

  In the silence of the morning the sentries at the fort’s gate heard the rumble of a convoy approaching them from the east. They voxed the news to Major Roussell and he hurried over. Finally, it was Captain Drum’s armour, and as pleased as Roussell was to add the armoured company to the garrison, he was even more keen to rub Drum’s face in the victory he had missed.

  Hard as Roussell found it to imagine, the flamboyant tank commander fought not to garner personal glory but for the sheer thrill of riding his tank into combat. Why on earth would any sane man want to do that? The answer, of course, was that Drum wasn’t sane, he was howling mad. Roussell had never understood the crazy fool, and certainly did not understand why the colonel overlooked the man’s eccentricities. He disliked him intensely as a result. And it didn’t help that a population of the wives and widows thought Drum’s ridiculous, tightly-cut costumes rather dashing and paid him a good deal more attention on his arrival than they had ever done Roussell.

  The pitch of the rumble rose as the vehicles got closer and Roussell waited for the first of them to emerge around the curve of the track leading to the fort. Nothing appeared, and then the rumble was overshadowed by the whoosh of a Valkyrie coming in low, ready to land.

  ‘Colonel!’ Roussell acknowledged Arbulaster and saluted rather briskly. He’d had to run from the gate to the landing area and was not best pleased about it.

  ‘Major.’ Arbulaster returned the salute with equal discourtesy.

  ‘Captain Drum has not yet arrived, sir. I do believe he may have taken a wrong turn on the way here,’ Roussell reported with satisfaction. ‘I’m not sure if he may have missed some instruction during one of his wardrobe changes...’

  ‘Unlikely, major,’ Arbulaster replied without humour. After an entire night of authorising every single action Roussell took, including lavatorial demands, he was quite sick of the sound of him. It was a pity really, he had once been a rather talented and highly courageous infantry commander, but over-quick promotion and the assurance of a place in the colour-guard had curbed his audacity and he had shrivelled into paranoid mediocrity.

  ‘Captain Drum is on his way to the start point. As you should be, major, if you intend the infantry to play any kind of role in taking the crater.’

  ‘The attack... It’s still going ahead today?’ Roussell was a little astonished.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Arbulaster replied. ‘What did you expect, major? A few weeks R&R to recover from missing a night’s sleep?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Roussell started, mortified.

  ‘They’re on the run and we can hit them hard. They’ve played right into our hands.’ Arbulaster laid a comradely hand on Roussell’s shoulder. ‘We didn’t want them boltholed in their rok up there. No! We wanted to get them out, have a stab at us where we’re ready for them in a rok of our own. And they broke themselves on it.’

  ‘Yes, I–’

  ‘After all, why do you think I put you out here in the first place?’

  Arbulaster’s intention in ordering the infantry into fortified positions at night had had nothing to do with luring the orks into an attack, but if there was credit to be had he intended to grab his fair share before Roussell had the lot.

  At Roussell’s insistence he briefly inspected the breach, sombrely looked over the bodies of the men as they were buried in the trench and finally ordered the walls they had died defending be brought down.

  It might have appeared a trifle heartless, but Arbulaster was past caring about a few troopers. His message was clear. Fort Eliza had served its purpose and kept them safe for a night; now their entire force was going to be thrown against the ork rok and he wanted none of his men being tempted to retreat from the field to hole up back here. It was to be all or nothing for them, as it was for him as well.

  T
he Brimlock 11th sat on the ground watching the beards cut through the trunk of the last tree in their path.

  ‘Kay-Vee!’ The call went up, though every man there was already aware. The tree toppled to one side and the seated men raised a ragged cheer. Lieutenant Mulberry pivoted his Sentinel to face them and then leaned the cockpit forwards in imitation of a bow. The sarcastic cheer was replaced by a ripple of genuine laughter, which in turn dissipated before the angry bawling of the regiment’s sergeants.

  ‘On your feet! On your feet! In your sections! In your sections! Ready march!’

  Drum’s tank men rose to their engines and Ledbetter’s horses whinnied and stomped the ground.

  ‘One moment.’ The colonel’s voice cut through it all. He stood upon Drum’s tank using its vox-amplifiers.

  ‘In his name.’

  The cavalry dipped their lance points and the men lowered their heads.

  ‘The Emperor expects each man to give his strength, his spirit, his all, as he gave for us.’

  The colonel made the sign of the aquila; most men followed, a jaded few did not.

  ‘For death in His service is no end, for those that fall shall live on in His light.’

  Those with faith in the crowd nodded along; it was the truth, they’d always been told so.

  ‘Now, men of Brimlock, raise your voices. For Marguerite, for the Crusade, Purge the xenos! Destroy them all! To arms! To war! The Emperor calls! For the Emperor!’

  ‘FOR THE EMPEROR!’ the regiment swore.

  The cavalry raised their lances and the bugler called the advance. The tanks growled back to life and eased forwards into the lichen, Drum standing proud upon the lead tank, dressed in the brocaded jacket of an ancient Brimlock cavalryman. Rosa and the heavy artillery rolled out next, the Griffon mortar vehicles following in the tracks of the tanks. Finally, the infantry companies fell in, Roussell first leading the two light companies, behind him Brooce commanding the line, and by his side the command section flew the regiment’s colours high.

  Beneath those colours marched the Brimlock 11th, the mind of each man plagued with the fear that they would die here, at the last. The mind of each man but one. One lieutenant, whose thoughts were not focused on his own death, but on the death of Commissar Reeve. Today that death, he swore, was guaranteed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fungal plain, Tswaing, Voor pacification Stage 1 Day 18

  Killing a man on a battlefield, even a man on your own side, was simple. Hundreds of men, sometimes thousands, died on every single one. Killing a man universally loathed and despised was even easier.

  Killing a commissar, supposedly a direct representative of the authority of the God-Emperor of Terra, was very different. Their daily meat and wine was to be hated and despised. No one even remotely careless or sloppy ever made it to wearing the black coat and the skull insignia of the Commissariat. Commissars had the inherent authority to execute immediately and without explanation any trooper or officer who they suspected of cowardice, incompetence, treachery or taint, as judged solely by themselves. Some armies, some entire campaigns, had been saved as a result of quick and terminal action taken by a commissar to remove swiftly from the command structure any who had been infected with fear, madness or disease. But mostly they contented themselves with ruling troopers and officers alike with an iron fist in an iron glove, exacting terrible punishments for the slightest infractions that caught their attention.

  Carson considered that conspiring to kill one of their number might just attract that kind of attention. He could not simply walk up to Reeve and shoot him. Even if he did not mind dying himself, the revenge would be taken out on his men as well. Therefore, the attack would have to be untraceable, completely deniable, and it would have to succeed first time, or his entire company might as well line up against a wall and save the firing squads the trouble.

  They were setting a quick pace, quicker by a fraction than the rest of the regiment. The column was beginning to stretch out. These fungus fields were bizarre. Many of the orkoid fungi shared properties with the fully formed orks themselves. Some were the same colour, others even had knots and growths that resembled ork heads and muscles. This was no longer a trek through a jungle on Voor, this was an invasion of the skin of a single giant organism, whose many natural defences were ranged against them.

  He could hear the whoops of Ledbetter’s cavalry ahead. Many of the ork survivors of their assault the night before had stumbled back to the fungus jungle and dispersed, scavenging for food and water, and a place to finally rest. They were awoken now by the rumbling of Brimlock tanks and struggled from shelter to find horsemen all around them, firing las-shots into them at near point-blank range.

  The column’s progress was fast, faster than even Arbulaster had expected. The ground was soft underfoot. It was made up of the ash of the trees that had once been there, the trees that had burned when the rok had struck. And on top of that ash now grew the bizarre array of fungus that sustained the orkoid species. The few stumps that remained were so riddled with these parasitic growths that they crumbled easily before the shells of the armoured company. The treads of the tanks and the hooves of the cavalry’s horses found easy purchase in the ground-mould, but kicked up such a cloud of spores that the infantry following behind were covered. Arbulaster gave the armoured company permission to open their throttles, and they surged ahead.

  The ork resistance was non-existent, in any case. Everywhere they were running, and the cavalry was harrying at their heels, and now amongst them came the tanks of Captain Drum, straight towards the crest of the crater that hid their last objective.

  On top of the leading tank, Drum stood and sang in sheer pleasure. He hadn’t engaged the vox-casters yet and the sound was lost beneath the bellows of the machine-spirits. The orks, with their clubs and spears, scattered before the engines of forty-first millennium warfare. Drum stood tall, outside of the protection of the armoured turret, and rode the vehicle as though it were a giant shield and he was some ancient chieftain being borne into battle.

  Captain Ledbetter galloped back towards him, running to ground a confused ork who had broken in the wrong direction. Ledbetter leaned forwards in his saddle as he swept his chainsword down and hewed through the ork’s back. It dropped, its spine severed, and Ledbetter tugged his reins as his horse instinctively swerved away from the falling body.

  Drum doffed his tricorne hat and waved it at the horse dragoon as he circled, about to return to his squadron. Ledbetter pointedly ignored him, but Drum did not care. He was happy. He was more than that; he was ecstatic. He was not quite sure when he had gone mad, he was not even certain he was mad at all. He had been born literally by the side of the production line in a factory on Brimlock, his mother one of thousands of menial servers who laboured in that one plant alone. He was raised by her side, watching the manufactorum adepts assemble the revered engines of war, and here he was, having gone from crewman, to officer, to commander, to captain through this crusade, riding such a beast and leading his armoured company into the fight on a far-distant world. What a life it was compared to that which he would have lived had he stayed on the production lines. What a life the Guard had given him!

  Drum swept back his cape, raised one knee-high boot and stomped twice on his tank’s turret.

  ‘Aiken, clear the path!’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ the reply came from his gunner. The turret rotated a fraction to target a knot of hardened fungus stalks and Drum whooped as it roared. He began to sing again.

  Ledbetter ducked a fraction in his saddle as the tank’s cannon fired and silently cursed his instinct. Even his horse had had that trained out of him. Was he not even this animal’s equal? He spurred it forwards from the advancing line of tanks and revved his chainsword to clear it of the ork’s remains.

  Ahead of him, the rest of his squadron were chasing the band of orks they had rousted. As Ledbette
r watched, he saw one of the beasts trip and roll. The lancer who had been after it was taken by surprise, stabbed and missed. His horse broke its step to avoid getting its legs entangled and galloped on with the rest. The fortunate ork rose unscathed and then launched itself upon one of the squadron’s stragglers, caught the man’s leg and managed to rip him from the saddle. It raised a meaty fist to smash in the back of the prone lancer’s head and Ledbetter sliced its arm through at the elbow. The ork did not even have time to howl in pain before Ledbetter’s back-cut mutilated its face.

  A good kill, Ledbetter considered, as he watched the fallen lancer clamber wretchedly to his feet. But it would not be enough. Not enough to be selected as one of the colour-guard. He had already failed it twice, the first time with the 74th when it was dissolved after Mespots and a second time with the 56th just a few weeks ago. He had been so certain that time, but no, the regiment’s commissar had vetoed him and his colonel had not cared enough to fight. Now he had to prove himself again, in just these last few days, or he would never return to Brimlock and prove to his family what he had become.

  But there! There on the hills before them was a challenge that would burn his name onto the list for the colour-guard.

  The orks weren’t running away. They were running towards.

  A warband had appeared over the rim of the crater and had marched halfway down the slope on the other side. Their presence had formed a rallying point for the orks running from the Guard out of the fungus jungle. They scrambled up the slope, up off the more level ground where the cavalry dominated, and joined the warband’s ranks. That single ork warchief suddenly found himself commanding not one, but two, three, then five warbands’ strength as more and more of the scattered orks sensed the growing concentration of power and instinctively flocked in its direction.