[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour

by Gordon Rennie - (ebook by Undead)

  Frateris defenders crowded round the man, then parted to let Devane through. The man was dying, the preacher saw instantly, the quilted flak jacket that he wore and which had partially protected him from the snipers’ fury was soaked dark with blood. Devane knelt over him, bestowing the Blessing of the Fallen upon him as gentle hands took hold of the body of the child cradled in the dying man’s arms. The boy moaned in pain as he was lifted away.

  “He lives,” breathed one of the frateris in wonder, sending a thrilled ripple of surprise out into the ranks of the brethren crowded close around.

  “Take him to the infirmary,” ordered Devane. “See to it that the blessed sisters tend to him as best they can.”

  “It is a sign,” called one of the frateris elders, his red-and-gold fringed robes and mortified skin-markings identifying him as a follower of the zealot-minded Redemptionist sub-cult of the Imperial Faith. “First the Emperor sends the father confessor to lead us in the defence of this holy place, and now he sends us this sign that he is watching over us still!”

  Others took up the cry, and soon the barricades rang with the joyous shouts and devotional chants of the faithful. Devane moved amongst his flock, outwardly sharing in their excitement. He offered words of encouragement and pious fortitude. He politely but firmly refused the small but precious gifts of food and drink that many tried to press upon him, knowing that food supplies were already at a premium, and that many of these people had not eaten properly in days. He bestowed blessings on men and weapons, and sat praying with an injured frateris brother who had remained on duty on the barricades for the last two days, refusing to give up firing control of the heavy stubber he had manned since the beginning of the siege. The man was obviously dying—Devane could smell the tell-tale sickly odour of gangrene-rotted flesh from beneath the man’s bandaged wounds—but he was amongst the best gunners they had, and Devane quietly acceded to the man’s clear but unspoken wish to die fighting the Emperor’s enemies rather than amongst the sick and injured that already crowded the cathedral’s infirmary.

  Devane did all this devoutly and faithfully as an Imperial preacher and servant of the God-Emperor, but all the while from inside him the voice of the military commander he had once been told him that it was ultimately all in vain.

  A sign or miracle, he thought to himself, momentarily allowing that doubting, questioning voice free rein. Two brave and able-bodied fighting men dead, and for what? The life of an injured child who, if he does not die from his wounds in the next few hours, will die along with the rest of us in a few days time anyway? Tell me, preacher, where is the Emperor-ordained miracle in any of this? Where is the sign that these good and faithful people have not been betrayed and abandoned by the mighty Imperium which they were always told was there to protect them?

  Devane shook his head in a physical effort to dispel such blasphemous doubts from his mind. If he truly believed that, he told himself in reply, then why did he not climb over the barricades now and run across the square to join those other heretics massed there? This was the poisoned reasoning that had caused so many of this world’s population to turn away from the Emperor’s divine light and instead go towards the darkness of the malignant and false powers of the warp, he realised.

  “Father confessor?”

  In gratitude, the preacher drew his mind away from such thoughts and turned towards the speaker now addressing him. It was a young Ecclesiarch scribe-acolyte, clearly nervous and overawed in the presence of the great and mighty warrior-priest confessor. Devane was still unable to come to terms with this new image of himself as some towering and inspirational presence in the minds of the cathedral defenders. Father confessor, they called him, yet Devane was not even certain that he was properly entitled to his newly-ordained rank. It had been bestowed upon him by the impressive and imposing figure of the Arbites commander—Byzantane, he had been called—when he had arrived to supervise the Arbitrators’ final withdrawal from the Ecclesiarch cathedral. It had been Byzantane who had authorized for the frateris to be given whatever weapons and supplies the Arbites had to spare, and it had been Byzantane who had shrewdly realised the Imperial preacher’s worth.

  “A Guard officer turned holy man,” the Arbitrator had said, looking speculatively at Devane. “We could use a man of your abilities defending the Imperium compound across the river. You’ll be doing your duty to the Emperor just as you are here, but there’ll be a place on an evacuation shuttle in it for you as well.”

  “My place is here, with my flock,” Devane had answered. “I have led them this far. I cannot abandon them now. If they must remain here, then I must remain with them.”

  Byzantane had nodded in silent understanding, approving of the preacher’s devotion but regretting the loss of such a clearly capable and courageous servant of the Emperor, and had turned to go. Suddenly he had hesitated, turning back towards Devane. “A mere preacher is an unworthy leader for the Frateris Militia. The Articles Faith of the Church Militant tell us that only an Ministorum adept of the rank of confessor or higher may command the armies of the faithful. Your cardinal is already aboard one of the orbiting transports, which leaves me as the ranking Imperial servant left on this world.”

  The big Arbitrator had paused, reaching forward and solemnly laying a heavy armour-gauntleted hand on the shoulder of the diminutive preacher.

  “Walk with the Emperor, Father Confessor Devane. My thoughts and prayers go with you.”

  Devane had stood stunned as the Arbites commander saluted him, and strode off towards the waiting grav-lifter shut-tie. At the bottom of the landing ramp he had again turned to back to Devane, his final words to him still somehow audible over the rising scream of the shuttle’s engines as it prepared to take off.

  “You have your duty, and I have mine, and those duties take us to our separate destinies, but I swear to you that one day my duty will be to avenge the loss of this world and the sacrifice of these children of the Emperor.”

  “Father confessor?” asked the scribe again, his voice cowed in tones of nervous reverence and again calling Devane’s attention back to the situation at hand.

  “Tell the brother arch-deacon that the enemy assault is over, at least for the present. It is safe for him and the other brethren to continue with the evacuation.”

  The young acolyte bowed and gratefully retreated, eager to be away from the dangerous barricades area and keen to rejoin the rest of his brethren in the safety of the cathedral’s inner courtyard, where they had gathered to await the arrival of the final series of evacuation shuttles scheduled to depart from the cathedral. Over a hundred Ministorum adepts yet remained within the cathedral, overseeing the final inventory and packaging of the precious Ecclesiarchy relics and records housed in the miles of crypts beneath the ancient building. There were countless documents and scroll-records stored down there, maintained and guarded by an army of scribe-adepts. Taken together, they formed a comprehensive record of the presence and power of the Imperial Faith here on Belatis, and thus were also a history of the thousands of years of Imperium rule of the world, the oldest and most precious of them dating back more than ten millennia to the time when the world was first reclaimed in the name of the Emperor. The planet and its people would soon vanish, but through the Ministorum’s painstakingly-maintained histories, some vestigial memory of it would continue to live on as part of the everlasting Imperium of Mankind, if only in the form of meticulously catalogued scrolls and data-slate recordings stored deep in the bowels of a Ministorum librarium on some far-distant Ecclesiarchy shrine-world.

  Accompanying the records and relics on the flight from the doomed world would be hundreds of Ecclesiarchy adepts, ranging from the Cardinal Astral himself to the lowliest scribe-adepts and relinquindus keepers. Many of the cathedral adepts had opted to remain here to defend the Emperor’s house against the heretic horde, but many more had not. If Johann Devane the man was tempted to feel any bitterness towards those who sought to escape the destruction of this
world and its people, then preacher—now confessor—Devane the adept did not, remembering again the final words of the Arbites commander.

  They have their duty and I have mine. In the end, it is our destiny to serve the Emperor in the ways He has commanded for each of us.

  FIVE

  “Master, you must come! The last of the shuttles is about to leave. The arch-deacon himself has commanded you to board it!”

  The frightened voice of the novice initiate roused Sobek from the light trance that he had placed himself in, although his astropath’s senses had warned him of the boy’s scurrying approach through the now eerily empty and abandoned corridors and chambers of this section of the Ecclesiarchy cathedral. From outside the cathedral walls, the astropath’s finely attuned ears picked out the now familiar sounds of combat, while his psychic senses dimly told him of the even greater chaos in the city beyond; dimly, only because he had deliberately closed off those levels of his inner vision with powerful mental blocks, fearing that the psychic Shockwaves generated by the confusion and terror of the doomed planet’s population would overwhelm his own mind.

  “I have already spoken with the arch-deacon, Lito. I have told him that it is my wish to remain here on Belatis.” Sobek turned his blind face towards the frightened boy, favouring him with a rare smile. “I have been on this world for sixty-eight years. Before that, I saw the faces of many other of the Emperor’s worlds with these blind eyes, but after so long I can scarcely recall which of them was the face of my own birth-world. This world is really all I have ever known. I have served the Emperor well, but I am old and tired, and I know that soon the Emperor will call me to him. Leave me be, Lito. I do not wish to see the faces of any new worlds.”

  The boy lingered in the doorway, afraid to return without him; clearly, thought Sobek, the arch-deacon’s proclamation that any adept-brothers who wished to remain to defend the Emperor’s sacred house was not meant to extend to brethren as unique and valuable as an astropath of Veneratus rank.

  From far below in the cathedral square came the sounds of renewed gunfire, and, from closer in the inner courtyard, the roar of powerful thruster engines firing up.

  “You should go now, Lito,” warned Sobek. “They will not wait for you, whether I am with you or not. Go now. We both have our separate destinies to follow,” he added, wondering from where those last words had sprung unbidden.

  The boy hesitated, took one last despairing look at his master, and then vanished, running pell-mell along the high-vaulted corridor and towards the sound of the shuttle engines. He had been genuinely fond of the boy, Sobek thought, even if he had been clumsy and inattentive, with all the signs of becoming yet another dull-witted catechism-mumbler, a breed of which the Ministorum had more than enough of already in Sobek’s despairing opinion. But, all the same, he had been fond of the boy, and thought it a pity that he had even less time to live than Sobek himself.

  The astropath again consulted the mystically-charged cards of the Imperial tarot, using them as a tool to unlock the prescient images that his psychic senses had plucked from the face of the warp.

  He drew two cards, laying them out in concordance and seeing dual images forming simultaneously upon their faces. On one, the image of a fortress with its towers struck by a falling star tumbling from the heavens. The Fallen Citadel. On the other, the highly-stylised representation of a space vessel, the occupants within it kneeling in prayer as they sought protection against the daemons of the warp that hovered in the air above them. The Starship, here appearing in its rarer sub-form, The Pilgrim Vessel. Sobek focussed his inner sight, again seeing the same warp-dream images of the future.

  Fire-death tendrils spreading through the rusting passageways and compartments of a space vessel, reaching deep into the vessel’s innards and closing around its beating plasma heart. The screaming faces of Lito, the arch-deacon, the cardinal himself even, and those of many other adept-brothers, all of them obliterated in an instant in a white-hot gush of blinding light.

  Sobek heard the roar of the shuttles taking off, all too aware that he had just seen the deaths of all those now aboard. His own death was only days away, he knew, but theirs would come even sooner than that. How or why, he could not divine, but their deaths had already been ordained and somehow he sensed it was not in his power to try to warn them or interfere in their destiny. As his own end approached—as the shadow of the Planet Killer loomed ever closer through the warp—he found that his powers of prophecy, always at best vague and indistinct, were becoming more accurate and finely-detailed. How this should be, he did not know, but he felt certain that it was the Emperor’s will that he be kept the fate that would befall the rest of the cathedral brethren. He had a growing feeling that he had been spared or forewarned because the Emperor still required one more task of him.

  He turned back to the tarot cards again, looking to find in their shifting patterns and faces some clue of what that task might be.

  SIX

  Like mourners attending a deathbed vigil, the vessels of the many branches of the Imperium hovered in waiting above the doomed world. Like greedy heirs apparent gathering in anticipation of its imminent death, they plundered the world of its choicest riches while it yet lived.

  Bulky troop transports took aboard the fighting men of two full Imperial Guard regiments, together with their vehicles and equipment. Garrisoned on Belatis, these troops would be spared the same fate as the rest of the planet’s population, although their evacuation had probably only postponed their destruction rather than averted it. The sector-wide war against the forces of the Despoiler was consuming Guard regiments at a truly ferocious rate, and even now some Imperial Guard war-marshal or Departmento Munitorium official was assigning these two regiments to one of the dozens of planetary war-zones spread throughout the Gothic sector.

  A seemingly unending series of freighter transports had arrived and departed in the last few weeks, each of them carrying off whatever part they could of Belatis’s abundant industrial or mineral resources. Tanker vessels had taken aboard hundreds of thousands of tonnes of processed promethium from the planet’s many fuel refineries, all of it laboriously hauled up into orbit by a fleet of grimy haulage shuttles. Cargo transports filled their cavernous holds with similar quantities of mined adamantium, ferro-titanium, trikali crystal and other materials vital for the Imperium war effort.

  A week ago, a massive and ancient transporter vessel belonging to the Adeptus Mechanicus had arrived in Belatis orbit, despatched by the tech-priests of Mars to rescue not only their brethren from the condemned world, but also the technology and arcane devices held sacred by the servants of the Machine God. For days now, their agile lifter shuttles had been flitting back and forth between the vessel and the planet’s surface, carrying back not merely the products of Belatis’s tech-priest-maintained industrial factories but also the some of those very factories themselves, disassembled by armies of servitor work-drones. These factories and assembly lines, churning out weapons and war machines for the Imperium armies, incorporated precious and irreplaceable technological knowledge held sacred by the members of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The rescued knowledge inherent in these automated factories, once reassembled and transplanted to the soil of a Mechanicus forgeworld, would once again be used in the service of the Machine God.

  Not all the branches of the Imperium operated on such a massive scale as the Adeptus Mechanicus, nor were their motivations for participating in the evacuation of Belatis so easy to speculate on.

  Three days ago, a sleek, black-hulled corvette vessel had arrived to join the Imperium flotilla. Although obviously a vessel of the Imperium, identifying itself as the Bernardo Gui and broadcasting approved Imperial ship recognition codes, the craft was of a design unfamiliar to most navy eyes, and officers crowded the Macharius’s command deck viewing bays to watch as it glided into Belatis orbit.

  “Inquisition,” they whispered in fearful tones amongst themselves, afraid even to say aloud the name of the
most secret and powerful arm of Imperium authority.

  The Bernardo Gui had remained in orbit, blanketed in radio silence and unresponsive to hails from other vessels, save for the three occasions when it had sent a single shuttle down to the planet’s surface, each time demanding and receiving an escort of fighters from the Macharius’s attack craft squadrons to accompany the shuttle on its journey to the surface and back. Each time the shuttle had returned to the parent ship after only a few hours. What it had done in that time—who or what it had picked up or even delivered to the surface to the doomed world—was a matter of much private, whispered conjecture amongst the crew of the Macharius. On two occasions after such planetary expeditions, the Inquisition craft had sent terse, firmly-worded commands to several of the navy vessels protecting the evacuation flotilla that they were to carry out an immediate and intense orbital bombardment of two precise points on the planet’s surface, one of which was a small but densely populated city in the southern part of Belatis’s largest continent.

  Whatever the Inquisition had been doing on Belatis, it clearly wanted no trace of itself left behind for the enemy to find.

  Two days ago, another, different Imperial vessel had arrived to join the growing armada. Looking through the command deck’s port viewing bay, Hito Ulanti could see it now, circling in watchful high orbit above Belatis. It was the Inviolable Retribution, a Punisher class Arbites strike cruiser, constructed in much the same way as the Adeptus Astartes variant and intended for much the same purpose: rapid response planetary assault force deployment and orbital offensive support. Ulanti studied its lean, brutal lines and fearsome armaments with an admiring eye, while the naval officer in him couldn’t help assessing the lawkeeper ship’s likely capabilities and comparing them to those of his own vessel. The Arbites cruiser was smaller and faster than the navy warship, more heavily armoured and packed more of an offensive punch, but the Macharius was a long-range patrol vessel, designed for extended, independent operation and had a wider variety of offensive and defensive capabilities.