Roaring in angry defiance, throat raw from bellowing a nonstop stream of Stranivarite curses, Maxim swung his chainsword like a maul, using it to shatter the skull of yet another black-cloaked madman. The weapon had ceased functioning minutes ago—it was either out of power or the workings of its whirring monomolecular chain-blade had become clogged with gore—but Maxim had preferred to keep hold of it. Its jagged razor teeth could still tear through flesh and its heavy, solid blade casing could still crush bone, particularly when wielded by someone of Maxim’s strength.
Adept Hyuga lay nearby, face staring up into the sky, rainwater splashing into his dead, sightless eyes. His bravery had given way as soon as the Chaos charge began. With a whimper of terror, he had turned and ran back towards the safety of the cathedral. Mindful of his captain’s orders, Maxim had let him take all of five or six steps before turning and smartly putting three heavy slug pistol rounds between his shoulder blades. Frateris defenders had contemptuously scooped up the adept’s still-twitching corpse and added it to the others, using their own dead as makeshift building blocks to fill the breaches in the barricade defences. Stacked with these other gruesome human sandbags, Honoured Adept Munitorium Hyuga contributed more in death to the valiant, desperate defence of the Ecclesiarchy cathedral than he ever could have in life.
Maxim kept on fighting, killing everything in front of him that came clambering over the barricade. Frateris defenders, awe-struck by the terrifying sight of this blood-drenched, bellowing giant striking down the Emperor’s enemies, rallied around him, throwing themselves at their attacker with renewed energy.
Maxim roared with savage laughter as he swung the broken chainsword, smashing it through the ribcage of one cultist, sending its jagged blade teeth slicing through the spine of another. Somewhere deep inside himself, Maxim began to wonder if he wouldn’t actually somehow survive all this. After all, he had been born amongst the clanless dregs of the Stranivar hive, into the lowest strata of hive society, where the average life expectancy was twenty years or less, and he had survived that, just as he had later survived and even flourished amongst the brutal and lawless ganger culture of the Stranivar underhive. And then too there had been the Arbitrator cull and enforced slavery on Lubiyanka’s gulag factories, before finally coming aboard the Macharius where again he had not only survived but flourished, a combination of strange fortune and calculated ruthlessness elevating him from indentured slave crewman to petty officer rank in a matter of months.
Maxim remembered the words one of the ganger women had whispered to him as they lay together in his underhive crib, surrounded by the rest of his gang. She had been a strange, wild one, Tanyara, with more than a touch of the wyrd sight about her. Exhausted by the night’s revels, intoxicated by tajii root and fiery underhive-brewed liquor, he had listened as she told him that she had seen him in her visions. He had been on the bridge of one of the mighty vessels which sailed between worlds. He was wearing an officer’s uniform, and there was the gleam of medals on his broad chest. Maxim had laughed at the idea then, thinking that it was the liquor and tajii root talking, knowing that, like all his nameless forbears before him, he would live and die on Stranivar without ever seeing—or wanting to see—anything of the other worlds that lay across the unimaginable gulfs of the Emperor’s space.
Tanyara was probably long-dead now—if the Arbitrators hadn’t got her, then the Ecclesiarch witch hunters or Redemptionist maniacs almost certainly would have—but Maxim no longer laughed at the memory of her words. After all, part of her vision had already come true. He had stood on the bridge of one of the Emperor’s warships, had he not? Crucially, though, the uniform was that of a NCO petty officer, and there weren’t any medals on his tunic breast.
At least, not yet.
Did that mean that the girl’s vision was of a time yet to come? If so, then that meant that Maxim wasn’t fated to die here with the rest of these prayer-mumbling madmen. Which meant that, somehow, he was destined to escape from here.
Laughing, he got ready to swing his chainsword again, and was almost disappointed to see no more black-cloaked cultists rushing lemming-like over the top of the barricade to offer themselves to his blade. All over what was left of the cathedral defence line, the thinned and scattered line of the remnants of the latest cultist assault wave was in retreat. Maxim threw the chainsword after them, drawing a pair of stub pistols from the bandolier of holsters and emptied them into the backs of the fleeing cultists, sending the survivors on their way with a stream of bullets and coarse Stranivarite curses. Blood mixed with rainwater ran down his face from a scalp wound that he didn’t even remember receiving. Maxim ran his tongue round his lips, tasting the blood that coursed down his face, laughing again because at least it meant that he was still alive.
Alive, and destined to stay that way, or so he fervently hoped.
Khoisan watched dispassionately as the ragged remains of his force retreated back to the ill-assumed safety of their own lines. He had intended to order his own gunners to open fire at them, but a better idea now occurred to him. “Round them up and disarm them,” he ordered an acolyte lieutenant, the man’s face rotting off in tattered strips as the new mutant form gifted to him by the powers of warp grew out from underneath. “They can serve as the shield wall for the next attack.”
In truth, the failure of this attack did not surprise or even greatly disappoint the Chaos warlord. The troops employed had been a disorganised rabble, little better than the human shield wall prisoners whose place they would now take in the next attack. Other, better, troops were on their way, called away from the plunder of the Arbites courthouse fortress on the other side of the city.
With a trained mental effort, he had quelled the Blood God aspect of his no longer human soul, instead giving free rein to the part of him that belonged to the Lord Tzeentch, observing the battle with the clinical, cold intelligence of a servant of the Great Conspirator, studying it for evidence of his enemies’ strengths and potential weaknesses. The cathedral defenders were close to breaking point, he suspected, their ammunition and fighting strength almost exhausted by repulsing this attack. The next attack, supported by captured artillery and even armoured vehicles that were also on their way, would smash through what remained of the hitherto stubborn cathedral defences with relative ease.
Casting out his Tzeentch-blessed mystic senses, Khoisan divined the purpose of the final task that was expected of him here. There were several important servants of the false Emperor amongst the cathedral’s defenders. All of them would die, of course, but one amongst them in particular must perish, the voices of the warp whispered to him. A simple task, and easily achieved, thought Khoisan.
His minions waited around him: weak, fallible things every one of them, scarcely able to understand the transformation that he would soon undergo. He favoured them with a commanding glance. “There is one amongst the defenders, a captain in the false Emperor’s navy. Issue commands that, when we begin the final attack, care is to be taken that he is not killed or injured. His death is promised to me alone.”
The minions bowed in compliance. Khoisan did not know why this one servant of the false Emperor had been so marked for death by the powers of the warp, but die he would, if that was their divine command. In his time, the Chaos champion had personally killed untold thousands of the weakling servants of the false Emperor. What difference was one more now?
Semper gathered what was left of his force in the leeway of the cathedral doors. By his estimate, there were scarcely a hundred able-bodied defenders left to man the shattered barricades, and, of that number, probably less than half had a clip or more of ammunition left for their weapons. The next enemy attack, if it came in anything like the ferocity and numbers of that last one, would simply roll right over the top of them. Caparan was there, supported by the turret gunner, Daksha. Both of them were wounded, but still willing to fight. Daksha’s weapon of choice—a strangely curved, heavy-bladed chopping weapon which he referred to as a
kukri—was clotted with gore, and now the quiet and reserved little feralworlder was ritually cleaning it, mumbling prayers to himself as he did so. Rahn was dead—Semper had seen his headless corpse amongst the rains of the barricades—but Borasa was still with them. Looking at the big hiveworlder, swigging out of a bottle of no doubt potent liquor that he had apparently spirited out of nowhere, laughing to himself at some private joke, his arms and face painted with dried blood to add to his skin collage of ganger tattoos, Semper wondered if anything could kill the man.
The members of the governor-regent’s court had acquitted themselves surprisingly well and with honour, but had suffered casualties accordingly. Only a handful of them, mainly palace guard officers, was still alive. General Brod lay back there on the barricades, his lifeless, bullet-riddled corpse surrounded by a litter of enemy dead. Whatever redemption the general had sought, he had now found.
Nearby, Jarra Kale lay slumped against a pile of fallen masonry, staring down in incomprehension at the gaping wound in his stomach that he had received from a ripping knife thrust.
“No… This can’t be happening. This wasn’t how it was all meant to happen,” Kale mumbled to himself over and over again, watching gaunt-faced as his life’s blood spilled out of him, pooling on the cobbles around him before being washed away by the ever-present torrent of rain. Two frateris orderlies carefully lifted him up and bore him off inside. The wound was almost certainly fatal. The cathedral infirmary had run out of even the most basic medical supplies and the Sororitas sisters and their attendants there could now offer the many wounded little other than prayers of comfort. Semper did not expect to see the former first minister again.
Devane too had survived. He had lost three fingers on his left hand at some point during the battle, and sat crouched in the cover of a row of statuary, the graven images of stern-faced heroes of the Imperial Faith looking down in disapproval at him as he bound up his crippled hand, cursing loudly in language rarely heard from any Imperial preacher pulpit. Looking up, he caught Semper watching him, and grinned despite the pain of his wound.
“You hear them howling? I think they’re getting ready to make another attack. Ready to do it all again, captain?”
“With what?” answered Semper, not yet ready to greet the prospect of his own imminent death with the same grim humour as Devane. “The barricade line is almost gone, and we’ve hardly enough men left to defend one side of the square, never mind all four. We should fall back to defend the cathedral entrances.”
“Agreed,” replied Devane, and then added with a laugh, “and at least we’ll be out of the damned rain.”
“Some more firepower would be a fine thing. That way, when they come through these doors, we could turn the hallway beyond into one long, cover-free shooting gallery.” No one disagreed with Semper’s choice of the word when rather than if. The heretics’ final victory seemed assured; the only matter still in dispute was how many of them the defenders would kill in the process. Semper looked round, spotting the remains of the shuttle that had brought him and his crew here. Whole sections of it had been cannibalised to provide more material for the barricades and what little remained was a stripped-down wreck. “Tech-Adept Ko, are any of the turret weapons aboard the shuttle still useable?”
The non-combatant tech-priest stood nearby, displaying the unnerving calmness typical of the servants of the Machine God. “Three of them, captain,” he answered, “although the craft’s power systems are irreparably damaged. Hence they cannot be made to fire.”
“Can they be removed from their turret mountings on the shuttle?” Semper asked. “If we find other power units, could they be set up somewhere else, perhaps inside the cathedral?”
“There are several portable power generators in the storage chamber in the vaults,” said Devane, excitedly. “We found them when we were searching for weapons. Emperor knows if they’re in any kind of usable condition.”
Caparan rose to his feet, helped by Daksha. “If they are, we’ll get them up and running. It’ll be a job getting those guns out of their mountings, though.”
“Take as many of the brethren as you need to help you. You’ll need some covering fire too, to protect you from those damned snipers.” Devane turned, grinning at Semper. “A good plan, captain. If we can set up even one of those guns inside that hallway, they’ll have to wade through their own blood to get to us. Maybe we’ll take a few more of them with us than they were counting on.”
“Captain Semper.”
Semper looked up in astonishment at the grey-habited figure standing before him that had seemingly materialised out of nowhere, seeing the distinctive psychic warding tattoos on the man’s aged face, seeing the blank stare of his hollowed-out, empty eye sockets and recognising him instantly for what he was—an astropath, capable of sending messages through the warp to his brethren in other far-distant star systems. Or even, thought Semper, those aboard not-so-distant Imperial warships.
“Captain Semper,” repeated Sobek in the strange, sonorous tones so distinctive of those of the astropath caste. “It is not the Emperor’s will that you die here today. That is why he has commanded me to live this far. That is why he has guided me to you.”
FOUR
“A matter of the greatest urgency, Drachenfels. We have received an astropathic communication from Captain Semper. He is alive, and trapped on Belatis, along with the survivors of his shuttle crew, the governor-regent of Belatis and members of his court. I am requesting permission to leave the convoy and return to Belatis to pick them up.”
There was silence on the command deck of the Macharius, before the voice of Ramas crackled over the comm-net. When he spoke, his voice was heavy with disbelief. “From Semper? How can you be sure? The malign powers always seek to deceive, Ulanti. There are many false and misleading voices in the warp. How can you be sure that it comes from Semper?”
“With respect, Captain Ramas, I believe the message is genuine,” answered Ulanti. “It carries Captain Semper’s personal command codex known only to him and this vessel’s chief astropath. Adeptus Rapavna is a loyal and experienced servant of the Astra Telepathica, and swears that the message transmitted to him is true, with no hint of the false or malefic. Speaking for myself, I am convinced it is from the captain.” Ulanti glanced towards the impassive figure of Kyogen standing nearby, who nodded at him in silent assent. “Other senior officers aboard Macharius, including Ship’s Commissar Kyogen, also concur with me in this respect. We are certain that if anyone could have escaped the destruction of the palace and survived the growing anarchy on Belatis, it would be Captain Semper.”
“And what would you have us do, Macharius!” barked Ramas over the open comm-net channel. “Turn back to rescue him? Risk the entire convoy for the life of one man?” Ulanti had been expecting the question. His reply was considered and succinct.
“Our mission was to safely evacuate from Belatis all valued servants of the Emperor before that world’s destruction. That mission is not yet complete, not while Captain Semper and the planetary governor remain trapped there.”
“I still cannot countenance releasing any vessels to return to Belatis, no matter the reason. The evacuation of Belatis is complete. Our first duty is to the Emperor and Battlefleet Gothic, not the life of one man, even if it is that of Leoten Semper. Maintain current speed and course, Macharius. I too grieve for Captain Semper, but, regretfully, your request is again denied. Drachenfels out.”
An angry murmur of dissent ran round the command deck. Like Ulanti, the command crew’s loyalties were with their captain. Then, from beyond the bridge’s central nave, a figure stepped forward, gesturing for the tech-adepts manning the communications section to hold open the comm-net link with the master of the Drachenfels.
“Captain Ramas, I am Marshal Primus Jamahl Byzantane of the Adeptus Arbites, commander of the garrison on Belatis. Matters have come to my attention regarding the continued presence of Imperium servants on the world behind us.” Byzantane
held out his hand, gesturing for the data slate in the flag-lieutenant’s hand. “Lieutenant Ulanti, may I see the transcript of the message received by your astropath.”
Byzantane scrolled quickly through the message, which was composed in the terse, abbreviated style typical of most astropath-conveyed communications, analysing Semper’s brief version of the events, together with the names of the survivors and their current dire circumstances inside the fragile safety of the besieged cathedral. Grimly satisfied, he handed the data device back to Ulanti.
“It is as I thought, Captain Ramas,” he said, his deep voice taking on a new, extra tone of authority. “Amongst the list of those who have survived along with Captain Semper is the name of one who I now know to be a traitor to the Imperium and agent of the malign powers. It is perhaps solely due to this person’s treachery that the crisis on Belatis escalated as rapidly and disastrously as it did. Such treachery cannot be allowed to go unpunished. I concur with acting Captain Ulanti’s plan to return to Belatis immediately to effect the rescue of Captain Semper and punish the one who has betrayed us all.”
“My reply to you is the same as it was to the flag-lieutenant, marshal. I cannot—” Ramas’s voice was abruptly interrupted by Byzantane’s own, booming command.
“You misunderstand, Captain Ramas. I am an Arbitrator, and the only power I answer to is the Emperor’s sacred law. I do not need your permission. I am telling you what I intend to do.”
[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour Page 28