Even though he knew in his heart that the Emperor’s work had been done, Krieg was horrified at the alien entity that had reached into the deepest recesses of his mind and had so easily influenced it. Something still did not feel quite right but there was little the commissar could do to ease his troubled mind and so he took refuge in the hot simplicity of casual revenge.
As the commissar closed on the paralysed henchwoman, the major called up the passage at him: “She’s just a child, Krieg.”
The commissar shrugged. “I very much doubt that,” he told Mortensen, mulling it over, before finally bringing the savage chainsabre to a full stop. He tossed the blade at the Celestian’s feet with the beloved shield of her order.
Dragging Krieg’s good arm across his powerful shoulders Mortensen helped the commissar limp and lurch down to the elevator at the bottom. Throwing Krieg inside, Mortensen stabbed at the button with his finger.
“Think we can still get off this dustball?” the cadet-commissar asked.
“No,” Mortensen told him honestly. “But it’s never stopped me trying before.”
V
The sky was black and oppressive. Colossal ork roks were everywhere, breaching the cloud cover and sapping the air of light and possibility. A cataclysm was unfolding before their eyes: decimation of such magnitude that it was sure not to leave a soul alive on the planet surface.
Rosenkrantz had heard the thunder of distant impacts roll across the murderous horizon and watched the mushroom plumes of ash, dirt and incinerated humanity rocket back at the doom-laden heavens. Purity Control hovered above the incarcetorium landing strip, with what remained of the Redemption Corps safely strapped into the troop bay, waiting for the pilot’s decision to surge skyward.
“Just give them a few more minutes,” Vedette urged across the vox. She was down on the open ramp with a bruised and beaten Conklin, watching for any signs of life on the strip.
“I don’t even know if Deliverance will still be there,” Rosenkrantz returned. “In all likelihood Captain Waldemar has broken orbit. Can you really see a carrier negotiating this?”
“We stay,” came the storm-trooper’s unequivocal reply.
“I’ve held on this long haven’t I?” the pilot insisted. Her mind was made up. “But every moment we wait brings that gamble closer to a certainty. I appreciate your loyalty, but we can’t risk everyone just for two men.” Rosenkrantz’s finger moved across a nearby stud. “Ramp closing.”
“I see them!” Vedette cut in, with more emotion in her voice than Rosenkrantz had ever heard from her.
The pilot looked down over the Valkyrie’s nose and at the open elevator doors. Two figures stumbled out amongst the wreckage of the landing pad: Krieg looked like hell in his ragged greatcoat and Mortensen, naked as the day he was born, bar some makeshift loincloth that flapped around his thighs, stomped with grim determination towards the bird. She swooped in as close as she dared to allow both men to clamber on.
“They’re on board,” Conklin confirmed across the vox, closing the ramp.
“Strap in,” Rosenkrantz warned them.
“Let me guess,” Mortensen crackled across the vox. It was surprisingly good to hear his voice. “We’ll be experiencing some turbulence.”
Rosenkrantz stared up through the canopy at the gathering gloom and nodded to herself. The pilot wrenched the stick towards her and vaulted for the boiling firmament.
The lively little Inquisitorial carrier answered well, rocketing away from the ill-fated planet. Like an iceberg emerging from a fog bank a gargantuan asteroid plummeted towards them. Clouds rolled away from the beast, electrostatic charges leaping between the ork rok and the churning atmosphere. It was like a mountain falling out of the sky, with its own geography and of more concern, its own heavy weapons batteries.
The airspace around the asteroid shook as a thousand exploding shells ripped the sky to pieces. Gentle course corrections became violent tugs on the stick, throwing Purity Control to port and then to starboard, diving and weaving around the artillery blastwaves.
Reasoning that it would only take a single hit to cripple them, if not blow them out of the heavens, Rosenkrantz turned the Valkyrie on its side and threw it at the ork rok. Closing the distance made it even harder for the guns on the plunging craft to acquire the carrier. As the pilot took the aircraft closer still, deeper into the natural canyons and craters of the asteroid, the passing cannons fell silent. The Jopallian allowed herself a little smirk. That was clever.
Suddenly the rock face fell away and the Valkyrie was in the darkness of the open sky. What the pilot hadn’t allowed for was the exhaust vortex created by the rok’s mainstage engine. Purity Control shook violently, sparks flying from the cockpit instrumentation. The engines choked and like an insect batted aside by a giant invisible hand, the aircraft span away. Fighting for breath and control of her senses, Rosenkrantz pulled the aircraft out of the sickening rotation. Allowing the Valkyrie to fall she swiftly shut down the cockpit’s overloaded instrumentation and sat there for as long as she dared, listening to the atmospheric howl of the aircraft falling tail-first back through the tumultuous cloud.
Rapidly re-activating the systems, she heard the alarmed calls of the storm-troopers across the vox. As the engines screamed back online, so the panicked shouting subsided. As she blasted skyward two more behemoths hove into view. One of the ork roks was rolling across the firmament, coming in much shallower than its neighbour. Rosenkrantz banked but the inevitable happened and she didn’t have the moments or manoeuvrability to do anything about it. The two asteroids crashed, setting in motion a series of explosions in and around the greenskin roks. Shafts and splinters of rock fell towards the Valkyrie in a deadly shower, the fragments gaining in velocity and lethality.
The pilot had to think fast. Flicking the safety off the stick weapons controls, Rosenkrantz feverishly fingered the firing stud, launching salvo after salvo of rockets from each wing. The barrage tore away from the Valkyrie, striking the first of the fragments and initiating a column of explosions through the cascade. Surging for the blasts, the pilot put the nose of the aircraft through the dissipating epicentre of the column, the flaming vapour washing over the canopy armaplas.
Things were no better on the other side. The two asteroids were in full collision now, the smaller irregular companion rolling across its larger compatriot, smashing the violent rocky landscape in between and threatening to steamroller Purity Control in the process. This, Rosenkrantz could not allow. Her response was simple. Weaponry and manoeuvres could not help her here. All she had left was the greasy, raw speed of the aircraft. Hammering the velocity controls she pushed the Valkyrie to its limits, streaking up the length of the colossal ork rok, with the craggy tidal wave of destruction cascading towards them.
“Come on, come on, come on…” she repeated therapeutically, squeezing every bit of power from the thundering engines. For a moment Rosenkrantz allowed herself the fantasy that they were going to make it, but her heart turned to stone as another dark shape appeared above, creating an artificial ceiling and a very definite end to the Valkyrie’s dramatic run.
The cockpit suddenly lit up with blinding white light. Cannons were firing somewhere and fat beams of unbearable energy were cutting across Purity Control’s flight path.
A shaft of natural gloom struck the canopy as the two roks parted, the smaller trailing a smouldering path of wreckage, the victim of the intense attack. Rosenkrantz was about to hit the airbrakes and bank towards the opening chasm when something struck her about the silhouette above. The angular lines and wedge-like prow, the lance batteries and carrier decks. Deliverance. The tiny carrier was down there in all the cosmic turmoil of the upper atmosphere, a sitting duck: its feeble armament and propulsion systems working double time to keep the thousands of Guardsmen and Navy crew out of harm’s way.
Something cool caressed her face and blotted her helmet visor. Overwhelmed by their excruciatingly narrow escape or simply glad to
see the ship, the pilot couldn’t tell, but she was crying: something she hadn’t done since leaving Jopall. Transmitting their clearance codes and coasting the Valkyrie onto the flight deck approach vector, Rosenkrantz loosened her grip on the controls. She felt the circulation return to her fingers and hit the vox-stud. The troop bay was silent. Expectant.
“We’re home,” she announced simply. And allowed the rest of the relief to roll down her cheeks.
VI
The observation deck was empty.
At first it had been crammed with off-duty Navy crew and Patricians eager to get a morbid glimpse: to see a world die before their glassy, uncomprehending eyes. The Redemption Corps had had their fill of apocalyptic visions, however, and were not to be found on the observation deck. Most of them were restricted to the Orlop where Minghella fussed over their numerous wounds and incapacities, patching them up for the demands of their next mission—it was the Redemption Corps way. A virgin Guardsman might expect a mercifully swift death in the ranks of the Emperor’s bastion, but the invaluable skills and experience of a veteran storm-trooper were always in demand.
Mortensen didn’t spare himself the pain of the observation deck, though. In fact, he found himself indulging in long, lonely walks there, drinking it all in. Seeing Spetzghast but dreaming of Gomorrah: spinning through the frozen, empty void. In those long hours he relived the fate of his home world and the nightmare of what he now understood to be not some random cosmological accident, but a cold and calculating attack on the human race: an opening salvo in the war that was to come, with first blood going to the enemies of the Imperium.
Spetzghast was a broiling, black ball spinning around a dying star, with a thin girdle of equally doomed moons for company. The major could barely imagine the hell down there. The air, choking and heavy—a black smog of soot and dust; the geological chaos of earthquakes and flooding; blazing cities and rotting corpses, the plagues of scavenging coot imps, picking the flesh off the dead and the dying. And everywhere the alien intruder, infecting and enslaving.
He had survived, however. Again, he’d walked out of the apocalypse. Given men like Lijah Meeks more excuses to fan the fires of their faith. Lived to fight another day. He thought long on Santhonax and her insanity: her Istvaanian beliefs and her desire to do good by ill. He couldn’t bring himself to think of her as part of the alien conspiracy—her own particular brand of lunacy had testified to that. She had undoubtedly been played by someone or something whose desire to test humanity to the limit surpassed even hers. To not just craft heroes from the raw stuff of adversity but to eradicate the very Imperium from the face of the galaxy.
Ultimately his survival and that of his men had rested little on his shoulders. Rosenkrantz and Krieg had facilitated their escape on the doomed world below and the good commissar had been wise enough to ensure their escape route had remained open for as long as possible.
Mortensen couldn’t be sure that with so many of his men off the carrier that Commander Waldemar wouldn’t try to press his advantage, up anchor and leave them there to die. In all the chaos and confusion of the greenskin assault, who would know? Krieg must have thought the same thing because before boarding Vertigo he had orderlies relocate Regimental Commissar Udeskee’s oxygen tent to Waldemar’s bridge. Deliverance was going nowhere. Try arguing the merits of mortal danger with a man accelerating towards decrepitude and death. Undoubtedly Waldemar would have tried.
The flotilla and the spindly Exchequer space station were gone, smashed into oblivion in the descending turmoil of the colossal greenskin bombardment. All that was left now made up the dismal numbers of their fleeing convoy. A ragged train of bleeding fluyts and crippled sprint traders were shepherded along by the bloated troopship Argus and the superheavy transport the Demiarch Dante. Without frigates and torpedo boats, the Guard transports—by virtue of the fact that they were armed—had been promoted from escortees to escorts. Their only true frigate, the remaining Firestorm-class Frigate Cape Wrath, led from the front under the command of Port Admiral Gordian Ferenc—who by a twist of fate had actually been on a citation hearing aboard the decrepit passenger liner the Witch of Shandor when the Exchequer and the Stang Draak had been destroyed. The Witch was now part of the pitiable procession, limping alongside a battle-scarred rogue trader. Deliverance brought up the rear, her lances watching over the convoy’s sluggish exodus. The greenskins took little interest in them, however. They had wanted to decimate a world and they had done it.
As predicted, the Port Admiral had decided on Aurelius as their destination. There had been favour, especially among the Volscians, to make for Field Marshal Rygotzk at Scythia, but Aurelius was eventually deemed the better bet. The Viper Legion Space Marine Chapter was based there and the system had been the departure point for Enceladus. Now that the crusade was over it was possible that a fairly large contingent of troops and vessels were still hung over there, waiting for despatch orders and reassignment.
Thank the Emperor for Imperial bureaucracy, Mortensen had thought: he’d always been a fan. With the comms blackout still in play and the strange but potent web of psychic interference—undoubtedly an unforeseen boon of the stealer-greenskin interbreeding experiment—making astropathic communication impossible, all the convoy could do was trawl up the Kintessa Gauntlet, under the weight of their precious intelligence. Pushing on, hoping to reach beyond the limits of this strange effect and warn Aurelius in advance, as well as other systems in the Kaligari Cradle deemed at high strategic risk of similar treatment.
The only combat-effective vessel not to remain with the convoy on this long and lonely journey was Krieg’s old ship, the Inquisitorial corvette Dread Sovereign. The vessel had some other dark purpose and with little warning had disappeared, leaving a stranded Krieg on board Deliverance. Port Admiral Ferenc was hardly going to disagree with a member of one of the Ordos and deemed it best to simply let the Dread Sovereign slip away with its much needed weaponry and troops.
The whisper of leather sauntered slowly up behind the major.
“Commissar,” Mortensen acknowledged.
Krieg stepped up to the thick plas in silence, his arm still strapped to his chest, lost in the spectacle of loss. “Hard to believe we were just down there,” he murmured finally.
“Believe it,” the major told him. “It’s gone.” The storm-trooper sighed. “What about you then? Aurelius, then back to the Pontificals?”
The cadet raised a singed eyebrow, clearly surprised that the major knew of his origins. Mortensen grunted. “I read a file. Let’s not make a big thing out of it.”
Krieg managed a bleak smile and put his hand against the plas, almost touching the void outside. “Thought I’d stay. Complete my rotation.”
“Might take a long time, out here,” the major warned. “If that battle-sister spoke even a word of truth, Gomorrah and Spetzghast are only the beginning. Bellona, Scythia and Calydon Prime are already hit. If the Kintessa Gauntlet is compromised, then the Segmentum floodgates won’t have been opened, they’ll have been blown off their hinges.”
“I’m in no hurry,” Krieg stated, pulling down the brim of his cap to his eyes. “After all—the Emperor expects.”
“He does rather, doesn’t he,” Mortensen echoed before leaving the observation deck and the young cadet-commissar, framed in the raging apocalypse beyond.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Head of English at a local secondary school, Rob Sanders is a freelance writer whose first fiction was published in Inferno! magazine. He lives off the beaten track in the small city of Lincoln, England.
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proofing by Red Dwarf,
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[Imperial Guard 08] - Redemption Corps Page 34