Astra Militarum

by David Annandale, Justin D Hill, Toby Frost, Braden Campbell (epub)

  ‘Valkyries!’ Major Luka shouted as the lead craft swung to the right, while three others pulled to a halt about ninety metres back from the Aegis defence line, their thrumming engines sending up clouds of blue dust. He had a brief glimpse of troops rappelling in pairs from either side, before they were lost in dust.

  The lead Valkyries came in again. One sparked a half-track that was pushing up between the burning wrecks of the lead tanks. It gouted black promethium smoke. Then the flyers peeled off. The din of their engines faded. The world seemed quiet for a moment. Major Luka paused. ‘Do you hear that?’

  Cadet Slander looked at him.

  ‘Do you hear it?’

  Slander shook his head, but then over the din of men shouting and dying and the rattle of gunfire and las-rounds, came the strains of music. Not the dull chanting of the enemy, but music. And not just any music. ‘It sounds like… Flower of Cadia…’

  Major Luka jumped up. ‘Sing, man! Sing!’

  The sound came clear and distinctive. It was getting louder. Major Luka walked out into the causeway, ignoring the las-shots that stitched the air about him. The swirling dust began to settle. Four squads of elite Cadian kasrkin appeared, coming in at a half run.

  Major Luka remembered being a young boy in the choir at the cathedral in Kasr Ferrox. Yes, he thought, the sight of those kasrkin was more beautiful than even the chapel mural of Saint Beatine. The music grew louder. ‘For Cadia!’ the major shouted, answering shouts coming from all across the ridge. Then he stopped.

  In the middle of the kasrkin came a bear of a man: officer’s greatcoat thrown over his shoulders, bull neck, head low, thrust forward, an air of defiant resolution, irresistible willpower, and the strength, courage and determination to resist.

  ‘Creed,’ shouted Luka. ‘It’s Creed!’

  Earlier…

  War is the heart that pumps life through the Imperium of Man. Cadet Fesk had learned that in basic training. War is the heart of the Imperium, and the Astra Militarum is the blood. What did that make the men he was watching? he wondered.

  The Cadian Cadet – known as a Whiteshield for the broad white stripe on their helmets – was standing by the side of a six-lane rockcrete slabway watching files of weary troopers fleeing back towards the planet’s only major habitation, Starport. The men were from a planet called Ephalia, and they were mysterious to him in their manners, food, speech, customs. Two weeks before, these troops had been speeding the opposite way down into the Long Dry, waving and whistling as they clung onto their lasrifles and velvet shakos. Now there was no cheering. They looked weary, exhausted and wounded. Even worse, Fesk thought, they looked defeated.

  Major Luka always told them there was no defeat for a Cadian Shock Trooper, only tactical withdrawal, counterstrike and, ultimately, a hero’s death.

  Fesk’s attention was caught by a gunner who sat half in the turret of his Chimera. His right arm was in a sling and he had lost his shako, his mouth rimmed with dried blue dust.

  ‘They’re coming!’ the man shouted in heavily accented Gothic. He pointed back to the lowlands of the Long Dry. ‘They’ll kill you all!’

  He held out a hand to Fesk, as if willing him and the other cadets up, but Fesk turned his back. ‘The Anckorites are coming!’ the man shouted again, but Fesk was already walking away. He was a Cadian.

  Major Luka was in the communications bunker. There was a steady crackle of static from the vox. He kicked the unit with his good foot and Slander, the vox-operator, as well, in his frustration. ‘What do you mean you can’t get through?’ he demanded.

  Whiteshield Slander shrugged. He’d been a petty thief on Cadia, and he had been lucky to escape the penal legions of St Josmane’s Hope. He was good with the vox-unit. It was just like picking locks, he said. But not even Slander could get through to headquarters. ‘It’s this planet,’ he said. ‘It frags the comms.’

  Major Luka gave the vox-unit another kick, this time with his bionic foot. The steady crackle of static was unchanged. He let out a long sigh and took out his order strip, written in the neat penmanship of a Administratum servo-scribe, stared at it for a moment, then sighed and slipped it back into his breast flap pocket.

  ‘What is that, sir?’

  ‘Our orders,’ he said after a while. ‘Fortify and hold the Incardine Ridge against Luciver Anckor’s cult forces.’

  ‘But those orders are three weeks old,’ Slander said. ‘When we were on the offensive–’

  ‘What are you saying, cadet?’

  ‘Well, I thought that maybe we’ve been overlooked. We’re only…’

  ‘Only what, Cadet Slander?’

  Slander gulped. ‘Only Whiteshields.’

  Major Luka bent down. Slander could smell sweat, stale lho-sticks, and the morning meal of fried grox patties as the major roared at him. ‘There are half a million Anckorites down in the Long Dry who want to get to Starport, and it’s the only geographical feature this Throne-forsaken planet has. This is the only place we have a hope of stopping him. Sometimes it falls on the weak and defenceless. But that is the job of a Guardsman, do you understand? To die so that others might live.

  ‘If we abandon our position, what then? Once Luciver Anckor gets up the ridge it’s a straight drive to Starport. Understand? He’ll be on your back before you can fight your way through this rabble onto a lander. And it will be a fight. Every one of those men will knife you rather than let you on a lander before him. I’ve seen evacuations. They’re not pretty.’

  ‘So we stay here?’ Slander said.

  ‘Yes, damn it! Dig in. We hold the Incardine Ridge! And we shall show those cowards what it means to stand and fight.’

  Major Luka had survived thirty years in the Cadian Eighth and had taken up the mantle of training the next generation of Shock Troopers. He shouted everything, especially when communicating with Slander.

  ‘You’re a stupid, know-it-all fool!’ he bellowed as Slander dug a fire support trench. ‘Dig deeper, understand?’

  ‘But the dust,’ Slander said, patting his sleeves, which were thick with the flour-fine blue dust of Besana.

  ‘To the Eye with the dust!’ Major Luka’s veins stood out, he was shouting so hard. ‘If you don’t dig deeper we’ll be burying you in it!’

  Slander dug till the dust choked him. They all dug – Lina, Slander, Yetske, Darkins, Garonne – as Major Luka laid out the defence, drawing lines in the blue sand with his good foot.

  ‘Fire support here, reserves here. Comms here, command and control bunker here. I want the foxholes man-deep with grenade sumps dug at the bottom of each one at thirty degrees precisely. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ they all called back.

  Fesk was with Lina, holding the empty flour sack while she filled it with spoil.

  Lina was seventeen. A hard little nut with a shaved head and big green eyes, and she was good with a blade. Most of the others found the rings that pierced her lower lip and the aquila tattoo on her left cheek a little off-putting. Not Fesk. He rather liked her. But she didn’t seem to appreciate the fact.

  ‘What are you looking at,’ she said. It didn’t sound like a question.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She kept digging. Her shoulders were lean and hard in her standard issue green tank top. Her back was wet with sweat, and it made the fabric cling to her lean contours. ‘I heard you’re to be stationed in this hole,’ she said.

  ‘With you?’

  ‘No fragging way. Me and Darkins. You’re getting that loser Yetske.’ She laughed. ‘You never know, the way he handles his lasrifle, you might be his first kill.’

  Fesk hefted the sandbag into place. He paused for a moment to look across at the long rubble causeway, up which the enemy would be coming. It stretched out for almost half a kilometre, lifting the road three hundred metres up from the Long Dry to the rocky summi
t of Incardine Ridge. ‘What if they don’t come up that road?’

  Lina paused, and wiped her forehead with the back of her arm, leaving dirty blue smears.

  ‘Have you been down there? Slipsand pools as deep as a man. They’ll drown anyone who tries to come off the road. And armour will never make it. Now, it’s your turn to shovel.’

  Ryse sent his own shuttle to pick them up: a stately barge suitable for a Warmaster, with brass fittings and an axelwood panelled mess with more fine types of luxury amasec than Jarran Kell had ever seen before. The colour sergeant spent a few minutes smelling each one and laughed when he picked out one from the back. ‘Look at this!’ he said to his companion, lifting up the gold-stoppered bottle. ‘Arcady Pride!’

  It seemed a shame to waste this stuff on pen pushers and Administratum consuls. ‘Bring it along,’ said Ursakar Creed. ‘We’ll celebrate later.’

  The officer who met them at the landing bay blast gates was a major of the Cadian 345th. He was in his grey dress uniform with peaked cap and black leather glove. His other sleeve was neatly folded up at the elbow, and pinned in place. He saluted smartly.

  ‘General Creed,’ he said. Men always tried to say ‘General Creed’ without showing their excitement. It was impossible of course, like saying ‘Ah! Commissar Yarrick!’ or ‘Commander Pask, I presume.’

  Creed nodded. ‘Where did you lose it?’ he asked. The man looked confused. ‘Your hand,’ Creed said.

  The man laughed. ‘Oh, on Rellion Five.’

  ‘Traitor Ridge?’

  ‘No.’ The major’s cheeks coloured a little. ‘My company were seconded to the Forty-Fifth.’

  ‘You helped to clear the Shima Forest.’

  The major nodded. He said nothing more. No need, Kell thought. Shima Forest had been a waste of good men.

  ‘I told Grask not to go in there,’ Creed said. ‘But I was only a colonel then, and Grask had stripes, a hundred years more experience than me and, well, let’s just say an arrogance problem. You were lucky to only lose a hand.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ the man said.

  Creed paused. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Major Freight,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me, Freight, this recall. It’s got to be something bad. How deep in it is Warmaster Ryse?’

  ‘Not for me to say, sir.’

  ‘Ah,’ smiled Creed. ‘Look, Kell. Here we have a man of tact, as pure as the driven snow.’

  The major’s mouth opened and then shut again. Kell smiled. It was always like this when men met Creed. They expected the Emperor Resplendent in flak armour and a greatcoat, with glowing halo and the aura of an Imperial saint, speaking beatitudes. Blessed are the battle-worthy, for they shall stand firm. Blessed are the chaste, for their faith shall be ceramite.

  What they got was Ursarkar E. Creed.

  ‘Show me in then, Freight. I’ll see for myself.’

  Warmaster Ryse was so deep in thought that he did not hear the door open. Creed. It had to be Creed. It had been Ryse who had pushed for him. Two years before, at a seven course planning dinner, he had softened up the generals with vintage claret from Lethe Eleven, then made his pitch.

  ‘For the next push I want Major Creed to lead the right flank.’

  ‘Who?’ General Vishron had said.

  ‘Ursarkar Creed.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘I have.’ That had been Lord General Gerder, a white-haired veteran with impeccable military pedigree and a bionic monocle. ‘He is an Utsider.’

  Utsiders were those folk who lived in the bleak moors and wastes of Cadia, outside the bastion cities that dotted the landscape. Who lived always under the baleful gleam of the Eye of Terror and who retained something of the wild about them.

  Ryse had set them straight with a few facts. Rexus IX, the Dreen Salient, Kasr Fuul and the Kamalang Bridge Campaign.

  Lord General Gerder had not been impressed. ‘But he’s only thirty-six.’

  ‘Thirty-seven,’ Ryse had corrected.

  ‘Never mind. This Creed chap has got to serve his time.’

  ‘Time? Time?’ Ryse had slammed his hand onto the polished axelwood table. The officers had looked stunned and the waiters had shifted uncomfortably around the edges of the chamber. Even the clock had ticked slower. ‘You could give me twenty generals with a hundred times his experience, but I want Creed. He’s a winner. And he’s good. Damn good. Macharius good!’

  There was a collective air of disapproval at the name Macharius. His conquests had been admirable, but he was remembered as a maverick. Loners, peacocks, demagogues and mavericks were the antithesis of disciplined, organised warfare.

  They hadn’t liked it, but they had agreed. He was the warmaster, after all. ‘On your head be it,’ Lord General Gerder said later, in private conference, a threat he had never been able to make good on.

  That meeting replayed through Warmaster Ryse’s mind as he paced up and down the bay windows in the feast hall of the governor of Hare. Creed had not let him down. Yet. But when – if – he did, Ryse knew that the high command would be waiting.

  Freight stood smartly aside and announced, ‘General Creed, sir,’

  Creed swept in and Ryse turned. ‘Throne, Ursakar, what took you so long? Listen, it’s that damned fool Travis,’ he said. ‘He’s been covering up a rebellion in the Gort System.’

  Creed silently held out an igniter and the Warmaster sucked the flame into the end of a lho-stub – one, two, three puffs, before it lit.

  ‘I gave him a safe job and he’s screwed it up royally,’ growled the warmaster, as Creed lit up one of his own. ‘Look!’ Ryse held out a sheaf of reports and puffed furiously as Creed flicked through them. The last one was stamped with the sigil of the Inquisition. Creed bit his stub.

  ‘That bad?’ he asked.

  Ryse exhaled slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s threatening the whole crusade. I need you to fix it!’

  ‘When do I leave?’

  ‘Your ship is waiting now. I’ve given you three companies.’

  ‘Will that be enough?’

  ‘It’ll have to be.’ Creed said nothing, so Ryse continued. ‘But they’re Cadians.’

  ‘Which regiment?’

  ‘The Eighth.’

  ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, sir.’

  Ryse ground his stub into the porcelain ashtray. ‘Don’t let me down here, Creed.’

  ‘This way, please.’ Captain Avery, a smartly dressed officer of Battlefleet Scarus, stood aside to let Creed and Sergeant Kell through the blast door ahead of him.

  He had insisted on taking them on a tour of the more interesting parts of his three and a half kilometre-long ship, the Magister Thine, though Kell would rather have been drinking with the five hundred Cadian Shock Troopers billeted in one of the empty cargo stores, as would Creed if he knew him at all. But this was the captain’s first command.

  ‘I am sure you will be impressed by this viewing chamber,’ the captain said. ‘Some fine ornamental detailing.’

  They stepped inside an arched chamber, with vast stained glass windows that were dark and indecipherable with the blackness of void behind them. Kell dutifully lifted his face to admire the mural of the Emperor Resplendent directing the Great Crusade in golden armour and halo. It covered most of the ceiling.

  ‘Very good,’ Kell said.

  Creed walked across to the viewport. Even through the thick armourglass, it radiated cold.

  Captain Avery coughed politely. ‘Perhaps I might interest you in something more… military. The gun decks perhaps? The Avenger-class has a most remarkable lance array. Far above her class.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Creed said. It was the first thing he’d said for half an hour. The captain caught Kell’s eye and the sergeant shrugged. Creed was Creed.

  ‘Apparently
the captain has spent some time on Besana,’ Kell said at last.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Creed turned quite suddenly. His manner was so intense that Captain Avery took an involuntary step back.

  ‘Well,’ the captain said. ‘Only three days planetside. There’s nothing particular about the place. All the usual for this sector. Stowers, geishons, enough stimms to blow a servitor’s cortex. Oh, yes, and of course cad-ore.’

  ‘Cad-ore. What’s that?’ Creed asked.

  ‘Who knows,’ the captain said. ‘All I know is that it’s what gives the soil its blue colour and that the Adeptus Mechanicus ship it out by the gigaton.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Well… nothing grows on Besana. And the soil is poisonous. Don’t inhale when you’re there.’ Captain Avery laughed briefly, then quickly added, ‘Not a problem for a week or two, but cumulative exposure will lead to rapid degenerative disease. Not a place for a protracted campaign.’

  ‘How long until we can go planetside?’

  ‘Seven hours.’

  Creed nodded. ‘I am sure you have much to do, captain.’

  He shook the man’s hand and turned back to the viewport. He stood with his arms behind his back, clutching a data-slate, staring at the blue planet as if it were an intricate puzzle that only he could solve.

  Night was falling on the planet as Colour Sergeant Jarran Kell stared through the dust-pocked viewports of the Aquila lander. Besana looked bleak, even viewed from far above. He’d read that fierce winds heralded each dawn and dusk as temperature variations sent ferocious dust storms whipping across the arid, featureless expanses. Dust storms, heretics and war.

  An hour passed. Maybe more. Kell stared out into the dark haze. He was lost in thought as the ground slowly approached. ‘We’re coming in to land.’ The navigator’s green screen underlit his face as the intercoms crackled. ‘That’s Starport,’ he said, pointing down to the left.

  Below them, Starport was lit up with glowing strings of yellow sodium lumens, revealing sprawling complexes of warehouses, habs, bunkers and the evacuation camps of Imperial Guard regiments.