There was silence aboard the Sons of Malice cruiser, the Bronze Minos.
The figures in the bridge wore archaic power armour of black and white quarters, with trims of brass spikes. They were still as shadows as they stood waiting, and at last a figure moved on the bridge. No one stirred as the newcomer spoke in a low hiss of fangs. ‘Agitor.’
‘Yes, Junger.’
‘We have identified the ships.’
There was a pause before the Agitor nodded. ‘Speak.’
‘The ships are from Cadia.’ The words had a heavy import, and Junger let them fall before saying any more.
The Agitor smiled. ‘Abaddon’s net was not as tight as he promised us.’
‘No, lord. These are Cadians.’
The Agitor paused. He did not turn from the viewscreen and spoke in a whisper. ‘So, Junger. This is all that remains of Cadia’s proud armies – a handful of hulks?’
‘Yes, Agitor.’
This time the Agitor gave a low chuckle. The sudden noise surprised some of the other figures standing there. ‘So. The chance has been given to us to destroy the Sons of Cadia. How could I let this moment pass? When we wipe them out, will they understand the delightful irony of this moment?’
‘I doubt it. What do they know? They learn nothing that is true. They will have no idea about us. About the past. About the blood debt they owe us.’
‘They won’t, will they? It’s almost sad. Perhaps we should let them know.’
Junger frowned. ‘They would not believe it. We did not remember. Until our eyes were opened.’
The Agitor mused on this.
‘We should just kill them,’ Junger said.
The Agitor nodded. ‘You are right.’
The name of the Sons of Malice Chapter had long since been erased from Imperial records, but they had been loyal once. They were one of the twenty Chapters known as the Astartes Praeses, Chapters devoted to keeping the Cadian Gate secure.
For centuries they had waged a tough and relentless war against the heretics and daemons of the Eye of Terror. The ferocious manner of war-making became a byword for the ruthless and relentless punishment of treachery and heresy, and they prided themselves on the cost they inflicted upon their foes, taking recruits from their home world, Scelus, where tattooed tribes indulged in cannibalism.
It was after millennia of devoted battle that an Imperial Inquisitor, Solomon Pietas, had witnessed the manner of their flesh-eating ceremonies.
Instinct told him that the Chapter had already fallen, and he had brought in a strike attack of Sisters of our Martyred Lady and five regiments of Imperial Guard. The combined force caught the Sons of Malice in one of their eleven-year rites when their guard was down. They attacked the Chapter with melta and fire and fury.
The attack failed utterly. Solomon Pietas was captured and sacrificed in the Chapter’s inner chambers, and as word arrived at the High Lords of Terra, the Sons of Malice were offered the chance to repair their sins with a fifty-year crusade.
The Chapter Master had refused. He would accept neither censure nor punishment. But he was a warrior with his own sense of honour. The Imperial envoy was allowed to depart unscathed, the low hiss of the Chapter Master’s defiance ringing in his ears.
‘We have done nothing wrong,’ he had told him. ‘We shall not do penance to any.’
It was a misconception that battles were won by strength, or power, or ferocity.
It was certainly something that the Chapter Master of the Sons of Malice believed. Typical of a gene-enhanced member of the Adeptus Astartes. But students of Imperial history knew that martial strength did not decide the victors.
In ancient times a snowstorm or inclement weather might have tilted the balance of battle. The victors were often decided by small, incidental facts. And in the case of the struggle between Inquisitor Solomon Pietas and the Sons of Malice, it was the inquisitor’s message that arrived at Holy Terra first.
The Sons of Malice assumed that their long history of service to the Imperium would vindicate them of charges that they considered baseless.
But the inquisitor had sent urgent and skewed accounts to the High Lords of Terra, and with trouble so close to the Cadian Gate, the panicked response of the Imperium was swift and brutal and sudden. An extermination fleet arrived in the Scelus System within months.
They would not listen to any of the Sons of Malice’s brief messages. It was war.
The Sons of Malice escaped aboard their battle-barge, the Labyrinth, but they left their home world of feral tribesmen undefended, and it was on the feral world that the forces of Cadia descended, scouring the planet of human life in a terrible campaign of fire and murder.
The Chapter had been forced into the Eye of Terror. There, they had fought both the heretics and the Imperium, until at last Abaddon had brought them round to his cause. Despite centuries of heresy, the injustice of their treatment had burned within them. After centuries of fighting and struggle, they had, through stupidity and alarm, been driven into the arms of the enemy whom they had been created to defeat.
The Chapter had chafed for centuries, and it seemed now they had been given a chance to punish the Cadians for the role they had played in their ancient tragedy.
All this was known to the warriors who stood on that bridge.
Agitor Kanath closed his eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks to the power of lawlessness and violence. ‘Fate is kind to those who hate,’ the Agitor said. ‘They destroyed the tribes who were our mother and father. We shall destroy them and eat their souls.’
But it was not just the Sons of Malice who had heard the rumours. All across the Agripinaa Sector, rumour flew. From the vapour world of Yaymar to the subterranean hives of Narsine, heretical warbands of Traitor Astartes gathered like carrion, determined to take their share of whatever glory was on offer.
Word travelled quickly through the warp. Daemons brought their mortal worshippers into the secret, and across the whole sector of what had once been Imperial space – the agri world of Albitern, the island hives of Tabor, the grox-raising plains of Sarlax, from Lelithar, the penal worlds of Bar-el and from proud Malin’s Reach – shards of the Black Legion began to gather like vultures who see an old and dying beast fall and struggle to rise.
Three
Agripinaa Sector
On the bridge of the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke, the alarm bells started moments before the troop tender Spear of Aegeas exploded. Captain Zabuzkho scrolled through the readouts. ‘What happened…?’
He knew the captain of that craft well. ‘Plasma reactor overload,’ one of the flight crew suggested, but then the first lance shots flared out, hitting the next ship, the Lady of Gygax, in her exposed belly.
‘Raise void shields!’ Captain Zabuzkho ordered. ‘Now!’
One by one the surviving ships of the evacuation fleet got their void shields up. While the Spear of Aegeas burned, the captain of the Lady of Gygax ran through emergency protocols in an effort to save his ship. She had suffered critical hull ruptures on all three troop levels. The ship would be lost entirely unless her captain took drastic action. He did not hesitate in opening each of his void gates.
The void sucked out the contents of the chambers. In the space of two minutes, seven thousand veterans of Cadia Tertius were expelled out into the freezing void. Those that forgot to exhale popped like human balloons. They died more quickly.
The others swelled as the water in their skin and muscles evaporated. They lost consciousness. Within two minutes all of them were dead.
The transport Imperious Georg was hit by a torpedo in the enginarium, rending the slender lozenge of a craft powerless as the Sons of Malice battle-barge, the Bronze Minos, moved alongside.
In a colossal broadside, the Space Marines of the Sons of Malice vented centuries of hatred on the defenceless warriors of seventeen surviving
regiments of Cadians aboard the Imperious Georg.
The Venerable Warrior followed the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke as they accelerated away, but there was no way that the slow transports could outrun a strike cruiser of the Renegade Astartes.
Grüber summoned Lord Navigator Hyppolytus. The abhuman limped into the room with his two ratling attendants. Grüber explained the situation. Was he well enough to take them to Terra?
‘The warp will not be any kinder to us than it was last time.’
‘You do not think we would survive the jump.’
‘I guarantee we would not.’
‘And we have no hope of reaching Terra?’
‘In these storms, no.’
‘Can we fight them off?’ Grüber asked Zabuzkho.
The ship’s captain shook his head at even the idea of it. ‘There is no way.’
‘Can we board them?’
The captain laughed. ‘We have no boarders. Only landers.’
‘Are the landers equipped with boarding devices?’
Zabuzkho shook his head. Grüber’s Cadian training told him to make the jump, to attack, to stand and fight and to sacrifice his men. ‘We could board them via the landing bays.’
‘It would be suicide. Their attack craft would destroy us before we even got close.’
Grüber leaned on the back of the captain’s chair. ‘Well, it seems we have no choice.’
Grüber closed his eyes. He could see Creed’s face in his mind’s eye: unshaven, the smell of his morning shot of amasec on his breath, his lip curled into a sneer as he listened to the older generals speak. That was what an old general would do, he told himself. He put his fingers to his forehead and tried to force the ghost of Creed to speak.
Alarms rang as Grüber stood with his eyes closed. The enemy was closing.
At last Grüber spoke. ‘Do you know this system, captain?’
Captain Zabuzkho shook his head. ‘I have not been in the Agripinaa System before,’ he said.
‘Anyone else?’
A Naval sub-lieutenant stepped forward. He wore the black velvet greatcoat of Battlefleet Cadia, gold embroidery about his cuffs, and a pair of heirloom laspistols on his left hip. ‘Sir. My name is Lieutenant Denyam. I know this system well. I served for ten years at Aurent. I was an officer cadet on a promethium hauler, the Maya Hope.’
‘Good man. Come here!’
Grüber spelled out what he needed, and the younger man nodded.
‘If that is what you want,’ he said, ‘then the best place would be here.’
He put his finger to a point on the system charts. It was a small moon in an elliptical orbit about Morten’s Quay, one of the inner planets of the Agripinaa System. ‘Morten’s Quay has one moon, Faith’s Anchorage. Uninhabited, beyond a few promethium mining facilities. Ice world,’ Denyam said.
It was Captain Zabuzkho who spoke. ‘If you land on Faith’s Anchorage, I will try and draw them off.’
Grüber listened to the captain’s plan. Everything about it seemed crazy, but they had no more options before them.
Grüber nodded. ‘Right. Then that is it. You will bring us into low orbit and disembark as many troops as possible. As soon as the landers get us off, Zabuzkho, you will proceed at full speed. They will either have to engage us or follow you.’
‘If they do not follow me they will destroy you,’ Zabuzkho said.
Grüber nodded. ‘Yes. They will. But then there is a chance that you can make it to Terra.’
Lalinc stepped forward. ‘General Grüber. You should accompany Zabuzkho to Terra.’
‘You want me to flee?’ Grüber asked. Lalinc tried to explain his point, but Grüber cut him off. ‘I would be mortified to leave you behind. Any of you. No. I shall stand and fight with you, and if it is our fate to be killed, then so be it. We shall console ourselves with the hope that word will reach Terra.’
There was silence as his orders sank in. At last Grüber looked up. The faces were all pale with concern. ‘Those are my orders. Please broadcast them to the surviving ships.’
Captain Zabuzkho nodded. Orders were relayed down the vox tubes, and the stars in the viewport were starting to pan to the left as the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke changed course.
Grüber drew his shoulders back and forced a smile. The end had come. On the ice moon of Faith’s Anchorage, Cadian High Command would make their last stand.
Four
Faith’s Anchorage
Old ship charts were clear: there was only one recorded point of habitation on Faith’s Anchorage, a small landing pad and hab-dome on the western icecaps, half a mile from a promethium mining complex.
Grüber examined the maps he had. They could be out of date, but they were all he had to go on. Hab-blocks. Mine head. Landing zone. Store rooms. Kitchen block.
In his mind Grüber drew up rudimentary plans, turning the mining complex into a fortress. Despite repeated calls – on open and encoded wavelengths – the outpost did not answer any requests for information regarding the current strength of the garrison, their supplies of food and equipment, nor any other ancillary details.
‘We must assume that there will be nothing,’ Grüber said as he put the map down. ‘We must take all we need with us.’
The enemy was closing in, but the Cadians prepared with their customary efficiency, their tech-priests stripping the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke and the Venerable Warrior of anything that they would need as the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke slipped into the gravity well of Faith’s Anchorage and powered down to disembark. It took less than six hours for all the troops to be ferried to the surface.
They found that the base on Faith’s Anchorage had already been wiped out. The generatorium was burned out, the Arvus lighters had been melta-bombed, and the ice was littered with the bodies of the promethium miners.
Grüber was unperturbed. He had a Leman Russ shove the wrecked landers into a rough wall of steel on the east side of the base, then set out his defence ring.
Individual commanders took over their own sectors, setting up enfilading fields of fire, kill zones and a series of fall-back points. Grüber gave the place a cursory look. It seemed ironically fitting: a small, unknown outpost for the pride of Cadia to make their last stand. A trail of landers was ferrying his troops down to the moon. He did not know how many he could get onto the planet.
He could even see the ungainly shapes of the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke and the Venerable Warrior. From here each craft looked no bigger than the last joint of his little finger. A third of the way across the sky the strike vessels of their pursuers were approaching. He used his scopes to view them. They looked like six lean snakes slithering towards their prey.
As the Cadians put the last touches to the trenches and firing points, Grüber had the void shield raised about the base. There was a whine as the tech-priests coaxed the generatorium to life, then the void shield flickered and shimmered into being, a buzzing blue dome above them.
If the enemy wanted to engage them then they would have to come down to the surface and slog it out, toe to toe. It would bring the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke and the Venerable Warrior valuable time. The two ships had already disengaged, each heading in different directions. The Venerable Warrior was making straight for the outer system, its engines flaring blue plasma as they were driven to their utmost.
‘Think they’ll make it?’ Lalinc said.
‘I pray so,’ Grüber said. His heart began to sink when one of the strike cruisers peeled off from the gathering fleet and made to follow it.
Half an hour later there were distant flashes of lance fire. Grüber took his scopes from Lalinc. He was just in time to see the Venerable Warrior explode in a miniature firework.
Grüber cursed under his breath.
‘There’s always the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke,’ Lalinc offered. ‘Zabuzkho seems a good captain.’
‘I pray so,’ Grüber said.
The Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke had taken an opposite course, flying close to Agripinaa’s sun in an attempt to get lost on the augury scanners. As the chronometer ticked by, it seemed that the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke had escaped. But as night began to fall on Faith’s Anchorage, the soldiers that he had set to watch the skies reported that a larger craft had appeared to cut the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke off.
‘What craft? Let me see,’ Grüber said. They helped him find the spot.
Grüber’s augmetic eye focused on the shape of the new ship. It had to be a battle-barge.
‘Could it be friendly?’ Lalinc asked.
‘It might be,’ Grüber said, but inside he knew that the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke was doomed. Even here, it seemed, they were caught in a net of steel and fire. And despite their struggles, the enemy was slowly tightening the noose. They used scopes to track the path of the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke.
It ran as close to the sun as it dared.
‘They’re approaching firing range,’ one of his aides reported.
‘Go on,’ Grüber willed it, punching his thigh, but then his aide reported seeing a sudden flash.
One of the ships was dead.
All of them knew that it had to be the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke. ‘I think they tried to engage their Geller fields,’ Lalinc said. ‘The reactor must have been damaged or the Lord Navigator’s strength failed. Either way, the Geller field reactor failed on transition.’
‘All hands lost?’
Lalinc nodded.
Grüber accepted the news in stoic silence. Terra would never know what had happened on Cadia. Half an hour later his scouts reported the first sighting of landers making their way down to the planet.
‘I should make a speech,’ Grüber said. ‘Before the end.’
Lalinc looked about and nodded. ‘Yes. It would make the men feel better, I’m sure.’
Five
The Battle of Faith’s Anchorage
Grüber had faced an orbital assault from Renegade Astartes before and knew what it would entail: war on all fronts at once – a blistering attack combined with overwhelming and simultaneous ground and air-based assaults, no doubt with precision strikes on key commanders via drop pod or Thunderhawk.
Cadia Stands Page 21