Krieg saluted and left Udeskee to his sick humour. As he pushed his way back through the oxygen tent’s plastic sheeting, he could feel the bile slowly creeping up the back of his throat: a sensation of disgust, though not in the way he might have expected. It seemed Udeskee was infected with more than just Mortlock’s Disease. He was infected with complacency; the lack of vigilance that allows other scourges to take hold of men’s souls.
As he left Udeskee’s quarters, the signet heavy on his finger, Krieg couldn’t help but feel conflicted, his own soul swiftly becoming a battleground between the poison in his ears and the steel in his heart.
And then she shot him.
Mortensen had half-expected to lose consciousness again but the oblivion never came. The battle-sisters were summoned and pulled his lifeless arms over their broad, armoured shoulders. Between them they dragged the major around the other side of the table and dumped his rag doll body in the remaining chair, pinning him against it with the side of the table to keep him upright. The battle-sister sat opposite, boring her interrogator’s eyes into him. Her henchwomen stood at ease either side of him.
“What did you stick me with, bi—”
“Name and rank,” the battle-sister cut in with imperious authority.
“It might disappoint you to learn that this isn’t the first time I’ve been tortured,” the major informed her, his words dripping with scorn.
“You can relax,” the battle-sister told him, amused at her own little joke. “I don’t intend laying a finger on you.”
“More’s the pity.” Mortensen coughed a laugh and gave her a dirty grin. Then he coughed again. The grin faded; the sister waited. It suddenly felt as though his throat was hone dry and tightening.
“Come on,” the battle-sister taunted, “it’s easy. My name is Diamanta Santhonax, Canoness Regular of the Order of the Immaculate Flame. Now, trooper, your name and your rank.”
Mortensen screwed up his eyes and gagged. It felt like he was being strangled with glass wire. No air was getting to his brain and the veins in his temples pulsed horribly. Networks of blood vessels bulged across his neck and face.
“M-M-Mortensen!” he blurted painfully. Something gave and air surged down his throat, rejuvenating his lungs and making him feel dizzy and warm inside. “Troop Major Zane Mortensen, Redemption Corps.” It was out before he knew he had said it.
Pulling back the longslide on the needier, the canoness deposited a second empty crystal canister on the table. Picking it up between finger and thumb she held it in the dim light. “The first was the enhanced venom of the Catachan lugwasp. Actually quite harmless, but you won’t have control of your lower body for some time.”
“You’d better get a mop then,” the major scoffed.
“This, however, is synthesised. A veracity compellent. I don’t know what they make that from. Classified. I do know that it’s very powerful: I’ve tried it myself. The Sisters of the Immaculate Flame prize truth over all things, so if you want to keep breathing, you’ll give me the truth and nothing but. I wouldn’t want you to choke on your own lies.”
“Are you out of your vrekkin’ mind? Is that your problem?”
“Maybe one of those pins went in a bit too far, eh?”
“Major, please. I could kill you with my insistence alone.”
Mortensen felt an invisible choke-hold cut across his windpipe. Beads of trembling sweat clung to the storm-trooper’s grimace as he fought the compellent’s irresistible compulsion. Truth gushed forth with a lungful of spent air.
“You come from Gomorrah, yes?”
Mortensen wanted nothing more than to have the canoness wait, but with the compellent coursing through his veins, he found his responses came thick and fast.
“Yes!”
“Orphan?”
“Yes!”
“Schola progenium?”
Mortensen choked back his truth but the words painfully erupted from him: “It didn’t have a name. They called it The Claw, Hephaestus Hive East.”
“Tell me about the end of Gomorrah. Some say you saw it,” the canoness pushed.
The major’s first few words were stilted, resistant, but soon they began to flow as the compellent cut through his reserve and into his honesty.
“I’ve seen my share of galactic battlefields; witnessed the taking of life on scales such that numbers become meaningless,” Mortensen declared with rough pride, “but I’ll never forget the day the comet hit Gomorrah.”
“I dare say I would have found it memorable also,” Santhonax hissed. “It’s not every day that you get to see a billion faithless heretics burn in the fires of their own blasphemy!”
“That’s my hivekin you’re talking about…”
“Let’s stop insulting each other. Gomorrah was a galactic byword for sin and villainy. From the undersump to the palaces, Gomorrah’s hives were corrupt to the core: factories of moral decay whose dark light was an irresistible beacon to the xenos and the pirate. Such a place is an affront to the God-Emperor’s very being and it was by His will that your precious home world was cleansed by the flame!”
“Usually, killing is just an unfortunate by-product of my trade,” Mortensen assured her, “but I can see that I’m really going to enjoy bleeding you.”
“Regale me further with particulars of your den of iniquity’s decimation.” Mortensen swore that he saw something like delight in the battle-sister’s eyes as she forced him to entertain her. “The truth!”
The major trembled in furious exertion, but the words continued to slip through his clenched teeth. “Corpse mountains… hives ablaze… unbreathable air… the world… tearing itself inside out.” Fat droplets of sweat rolled down the sides of his face, hanging, quaking and then spattering on the tabletop. At last, he had to breathe. With oxygen, came further honesties. “Half of all life ended… in an instant,” the major admitted slowly. “It’s humbling to be in the presence of such power. This,”—Mortensen flicked his eyes towards his scorch smeared flesh—“testifies to my dalliance. The cities fell and the toxic oceans rushed in to claim the rest.”
“Catastrophes are often romanticised thus; after the fact. I see no justification for your outrageous abuses in such sentimentality.”
“Gomorrah was due to deliver its tithe, but the Munitorum didn’t list us overdue for over a decade,” the major continued. “The comet impact had blackened the skies with dust. My people had suffered global devastation; their world had been plunged into volcanic hyperdrive and then forsaken in an impact winter. When the tithe ships arrived with a hive-world’s demand of a billion Guardsmen, all they found was a dead planet.”
“Oh, but you’re wrong,” Santhonax chided, “they found you.”
“When the Enceladus Crusade was forfeit their expected one billion reinforcements, what remained of Gomorrah was searched. I was the only survivor discovered.”
“A planet-wide search and you were the only living Gomorrian?” the canoness played, enjoying the obligation of Mortensen’s responses.
“What the comet hadn’t destroyed the lava swallowed: it covered everything. But still, tiny pockets of Gomorrians held on—living like animals, waiting for help to arrive. Those that had cared for me, helped me through,” Mortensen indicated the livid pattern over his skin again, “this. They survived the six-hundred degree days, the quakes, the starvation and thirst. It was the cold.”
“The cold,” Santhonax repeated. “Go on.”
“The sky was a blanket of ash. The temperature plummeted. The human body can only function within a particular range: below a certain point muscles don’t work, behaviour becomes irrational, minds shut down. I watched it happen, to all of them: one after another. The shock kills you: your lungs can’t breathe and your heart can’t beat.
“But you beat it!”
“Because I couldn’t feel it,” the major growled. “Like they could,” he added. “The mind-numbing cold couldn’t numb my mind: while all they wanted to do was curl up and die.
I could run a marathon in a snow drift and not feel a damn thing. It’s easy to keep your body warm, your muscles on fire if you can bypass the inconvenience of agony.”
Mortensen went quiet. The canoness narrowed those bolt-hole eyes.
“You were transferred to schola cursus?”
“Yes,” Mortensen told her.
“And the tattoo…” the canoness pushed. She was, of course, talking about the numerals emblazoned across his skull.
…999.M41? The death of my world,” Mortensen admitted solemnly. “Had it done at Cursus. Thought it should be marked—I should be marked—in some way.” A fierceness suddenly returned to the Gomorrian’s eyes: “There’s a record of all of this. Somewhere. Why don’t you go find it and while you are at it, why don’t you go get me an antidote or something?”
The black gauntlet flashed before his eyes with sudden violence, smacking his face to one side and sending him to the floor like some kind of invalid. There was blood in his mouth. He spat. He’d forgotten how quick she was. Moving back around the table, she sank her sharpened fingertips into the sinew of his neck and hauled him upright. Leaning down she brought her head level with his.
“You will tell me everything I wish to know!”
“Don’t flatter yourself, pinhead,” Mortensen shot back.
Santhonax’s face darkened with a sudden fury. The major steeled himself for further abuse. He soon realised that her anger had little to do with him—after all, she must have grown used to his insults. As he was impervious to her torturer’s techniques, she seemed unfazed by his cocky jibes and unvictimly behaviour.
The canoness put a finger to her mini-vox earpiece. “I don’t care if the world is ending, you tell the captain to hold his position until I state otherwise. No more interruptions. This is the Emperor’s work: I won’t have it sullied with trivial concerns. You understand?”
She returned her attention to the major, still rooted to the chair.
“Trouble with your people?” Mortensen sneered.
“My people are loyal,” Santhonax confirmed smugly, “much like yours, and do what has to be done when called upon.”
“Oh, we’re onto the ‘look at what we share, rather than what divides us’ line of enquiry,” Mortensen mocked her. “While you play personality disorder down here with me: the good sister, bad sister routine—the end of the world is literally coming to pass right over our heads. Listen to your captain, he knows what he’s talking about.”
“There’s plenty of time for all that,” Santhonax countered.
“We have to get off this planet…”
“From what I’ve seen of this world, it’s not above a little calamity, survival of the most fit and all; most fit to serve the Emperor, that is.”
“You really get off on all the carnage, don’t you?” the major sneered.
“You would defend those that, in the eyes of the Emperor, do not deserve to live?” the canoness remonstrated, leaning in closer to give him the pure spite of her eyes. “You would defend heretics and anarchists, xenos lovers and those who would bargain with the hellspawn and warp entities of this universe?”
“No,” Mortensen answered, the veracity compellent forcing him to deliver absolute truths. “But, I wouldn’t defend apocalyptic zealots and puritans like you either.”
The canoness smirked: something about the insult clearly amused her.
“Now it’s my turn to be truthful: what do I care if the xenos take this world or Ruinous Powers scourge the next? What do I care if the void vomits forth a colossal hulk and pounds your world to oblivion?”
“My world was struck by a comet…” Mortensen growled. His mind whirled. He saw the berg of rock and ice in his mind. Or could it be, as the battle-sister claimed, a colossal space hulk—irregular and impossible—sheathed in the cold of deep space?
“How do you know that?” Santhonax put to him with seductive reason. “I mean how do you really know that?”
“You lie,” the major accused.
Diamanta Santhonax licked her thin, sexless lips and leaned in closer. Her voice became low and conspiratorial: “What if I told you that I was amongst those who stood and watched? One of a privileged few, spectators to the end of a world? A disaster allowed to unfold!”
Mortensen swallowed. That’s why there had been no evacuation. No warning. He sat there, in his useless body; struggling with what he was being told, wondering what he wasn’t.
“What if these privileged few stood by,” Santhonax continued painfully, “and watched as your hive-kin perished in the flames of their own unworthiness, so that the truly worthy could rise, phoenix-like from the ashes of armageddon, better, stronger, more able to serve the Imperial cause and bring battle to the God-Emperor’s deadliest enemies? Whatever fails to destroy us makes us stronger, is that not what they say? You are living proof of such a supposition!”
“I’m going to kill you.” Mortensen promised her.
“You might. But if you did, would that not prove my little supposition correct? Like humanity, you are at your strongest when you are tested to your limitations. Did not the Horus Heresy purge the untold billions that were disloyal to the Emperor? Did not the Age of Apostasy herald the coming of Sebastian Thor and the much needed reformation of our Ecclesiarchy? Did not the insurmountable odds stacked against truly great men like Macharius, forge legends that give hope to generations in dark times past, present and future?”
“You’re insane!”
“One woman’s insanity is another man’s truth. Perhaps sooner than you think you will recognise the truth in my insanity. Until then, tell me yours!”
CHAPTER FOUR
Indifference Engine
I
Rosenkrantz had been told to expect heavy resistance on her first storm-trooper sortie and thought it prudent to exchange Vertigo’s long range auxiliary fuel tanks for rocket pods. She left it to Chief Nauls to oversee the refit and light a fire under the cogboys and servitors, Rosenkrantz; being in no doubt that the Redemption Corps’ dispersal would be swift and impulsive. The mechanics of the operation were already proving a real culture shock for the flight lieutenant.
Gone were the endless deliberations and slow preparations she’d been used to with the Volscian High Command, the Shadow Brigade being masters of strategic planning and clockwork execution. The common hiver was a rabid hound in the slips, but his spire-born superior was a methodical tactician. The Redemption Corps way of working was much more fluid: organic even. There were no sergeants barking threats of raw encouragement to their men; no squads double-timing it around the hangar with armour and weapons. Since the mutiny the corpsmen always had their armour and weapons and they were always primed and loaded. They sat around, smoking and joking, each man knew his part and he didn’t feel the need to shout about it. There would be enough of that down in the field.
The mission briefing wasn’t much different. The request for Rosenkrantz’s presence alone had been a surprise. Mortensen’s flag had been attached to an old Ryza-pattern Valkyrie, but the mission necessitated the transport of vehicles as well as troops and Rosenkrantz was the most senior Spectre commander.
The major had given Rosenkrantz and her bird the once over, only really showing any interest in her crew’s impressive number of confirmed kills and the fact that they were Jopall Indentured. This seemed to reassure him and he in turn assured Rosenkrantz that she’d get plenty of opportunity to work off her debts flying with Mortensen and his men. The only other thing that seemed to catch his attention was Rosenkrantz’s call-sign, stencilled across her flight helmet: “Boltmagnet”. The irony seemed to amuse the major and Rosenkrantz didn’t have the heart to tell him that her number of emergency landings almost rivalled her confirmed kill ratio, and that the Vertigo wasn’t actually the Vertigo but the Vertigo VII. If he’d asked her she would simply have told him what she told everyone else: that she crashed better than anyone else she knew. At any rate, the major transferred his flag to the assault carrier an
d summoned Rosenkrantz to the mission briefing.
The pilot had expected to go to one of Deliverance’s tactical suites. Instead the brited with soldiers. It was kind of cosy and informal and Rosenkrantz imagined that this was the way all Redemption Corps business was carried out.
The hub of activity was focused on a makeshift table in the centre, awash with pictograms and data-slates. A young, intense-looking adjutant was trying his best to get a battered hololithic display operational, much to the chagrin of a master sergeant and a hideous medical officer. Corpsmen lay sprawled across the crates, cleaning weapons, exchanging jokes and insults, waiting for the briefing to begin.
In contrast, Magister Militum Eugene Trepkos of the skitarii tech-guard stood tall and rigidly to attention like some kind of statue, although it looked to Rosenkrantz like it would be difficult for him to do anything else. His bulbous head, which was knotted with muscular concentration, sat amid a slender metallic torso and two intricate mechanical arms. Like the mechanised mandibles of some robotic crustacean, the specialised tips of his fingers twitched across the torso, feverishly at work on some incessant programme of maintenance and repair. A vermillion hood and cloak swathed his oddly impressive body, revealing little of the bottom half, bar the toes of his officer’s boots.
The ever-cheerful Captain Rask was introducing Cadet-Commissar Krieg to the major. The meeting was a cool, distrustful affair, each man’s eyes unfriendly and deep with civil hostility. As hands were offered, Rosenkrantz clocked Mortensen twist the commissar’s palm slightly in his own to get a better look at the heavy ring Krieg was wearing. In turn the cadet took in the ragged stitching of fresh gashes across the major’s arms and shoulders. As the major flicked his eyes back up at Krieg, Rosenkrantz detected the slightest nod from the young commissar. Mortensen’s lip curled into a dangerous smile and he slowly returned the gesture. The flight lieutenant felt like she’d just witnessed something significant pass between the two men, but couldn’t bring herself to believe that it was anything good. Captain Rask hobbled past, smiling, of course, and settled himself on a crate next to Rosenkrantz, working circulation into his busted knee with his tough fingertips.
[Imperial Guard 08] - Redemption Corps Page 11