Adamanthea received the talisman grimly. Her face twitched with a pang of frustration as she absently touched the great scar at her throat, unable to speak.
‘Superbia vocat corruptionem,’ he said, faltering. ‘Pride indeed beckons corruption. My love for myself, for my own ambition, exceeded my love for the Throne. Forgive me, Sister.’ He raised his hands towards her, as he heard a familiar whisper in his head, the name of the kingly terror that had possessed him.
He gasped before the voice could overwhelm him. ‘Suffer not the mutant to live!’
Adamanthea’s face seemed to soften at his words, as though he had spoken a spell that brought life to cold stone. She pressed something into his ruined hands.
His rosarius.
‘Ave Imperator,’ he sobbed, kissing the icon. Adamanthea rose. That terrible rigidity returned to her face. Her surviving Sisters murmured a blessing over her eviscerator as Marcus bowed his head, exposing the back of his neck. He shuddered with grateful tears as the weapon roared into life.
A heartbeat passed before darkness snatched the whispers away.
THE BATTLE FOR MARKGRAAF HIVE
Justin D Hill
‘What the hell is happening?’ Madzen shouted across to Minka as auto-rounds ricocheted off the rocks about them.
Minka threw the straps of the vox-box off her shoulder and threw herself forwards into cover. She had one eye closed. The other lined her sights up with the head of a heretic. ‘They’re trying to kill us,’ she said between gritted teeth as she moved on to the next target and fired again. A double shot, just in case.
‘I guessed that,’ he snarled, his cheek pressed against the stock of his own lasrifle. ‘I meant…’
She didn’t bother to hear what he meant. And when Grogar’s heavy bolter opened up, it filled the subterranean chamber with muzzle flashes, fist-sized bolts and a thunder that drowned Madzen’s explanation.
A few moments earlier they’d stumbled out of an old sewer pipe into this vaulting space, lit throughout by the luminous green mould that covered ceiling and walls. The catacomb had been broken and reshaped by millennia of hive-quakes. The cracked ceiling sagged, the floor slanted steeply to the left, and a filthy pool filled the sunken end, where vast stalactites stabbed down from the ceiling like the fangs of some prehistoric monster. They’d had a brief moment to get their bearings, and then the ambush had been sprung. And now they were fighting desperately for their lives.
Minka fired a quick salvo into the darkness, lasrifle ready at her shoulder.
The heavy bolter roared once more, strobe-lighting dirty, bestial faces swarming forwards through the gloom.
The Cadians did not panic. They knelt and fired, and fired once again. They were tight, disciplined, experienced. Like Minka, they’d all learned how to strip and fire a lasrifle before they could read. Fighting was more normal than civilian life.
If their attackers had been half-trained, the Cadians would all have been dead now. But they were not. They were hive scum. And worse than that, they were heretic hive scum who’d turned their face from the light of the Emperor and deserved nothing more than a las-round to the face. It was like a wild force of nature coming up against the indomitable brickwork discipline of Cadia. And the Cadians cut the heretics down in droves.
At last the roar of the heavy bolter subsided and, for a moment, it seemed the attack was over. All Minka could see was twitching piles of dead and wounded. She scanned the chamber then lowered her lasrifle.
‘Over there!’ Sergeant Gaskar shouted from the middle of the line. In the darkness and confusion she couldn’t see where he was pointing to, but at that moment more heretics erupted from the pool water only yards behind her. Spray hit her face and hands as she spun about.
Too late.
The blow hit her in the middle of her back and punched the air from her lungs. It slammed her face against the rockcrete slab and cut her lip as well. There was blood in her mouth as she whirled round and fired wildly.
The heretic was on her, and she knew in an instant that he was bigger and stronger than her. He bundled her face first into the dirt, his filthy and emaciated arms and legs enveloping her like a spider on her back. His black nails were in her mouth, grabbing at her throat, scratching for her eyes. But she was Cadian. She broke his fingers, dislocated his arm, and then dragged herself up to one knee and gutted him with her bayonet.
She put a pair of las-bolts into his belly, as well. Frekker.
The second wave came up out of the water and through a crack in the ground that allowed them to sneak right up to the line of rubble the Cadians were holding. It got tense, then. And close quarters.
Minka could never tell how long a battle lasted. It could be seconds or hours. The bark of the heavy bolter, the brief flashes of las-bolts, the scrape of knife on bone and steel, the shouts and screams of orders and of pain. She killed and killed and killed, and the intensity of the moment seemed to fill time. But at last Sergeant Gaskar put up a hand and shouted, ‘Hold!’ and Minka rested a shoulder against the fallen roof-beam before her and realised how much her ribs hurt.
The vox-unit lay on the floor, and two yards from that Madzen lay on his back. His throat had been cut from ear-to-ear. His head was pillowed in a pool of his own gore. She felt sick in her gut. Markgraaf underhive wasn’t worth the loss of Cadian lives, especially not Madzen’s. Any dead Cadian was a waste. She cursed the braid-wearing frekker who’d dreamed up this mission.
The heretic who’d jumped her was lying a stone’s throw away, face down, his back twisted at an unnatural angle. She couldn’t see what he’d hit her with, but Throne it hurt. For a moment she relived his attack, felt his fingers on her face, scrabbling for her eyes, in her nostrils, in her mouth. She wanted to kick him again as she pulled her flak-armour plates forwards to see how bad his blow had been. There was no blood. Her fingers felt along the line of her ribs. Nothing broken, she thought, and then let out a long breath.
Sergeant Gaskar started the roll call. Grogar. Matrey. Rellan. Leonov. Aleksei. Isran. Artem too, unfortunately. She shouted her own name.
‘Anyone else?’ Gaskar shouted.
‘Madzen’s dead,’ Minka shouted, and one by one the fallen were named. They’d lost six troopers. Three in the first seconds to auto-rounds and the others in hand-to-hand combat. Minka watched as the medic, Leonov, knelt by the wounded. There’d been ninety-six troopers in Fifth Platoon when they’d entered the underhive five days earlier.
They had stood on the pollution-grey ashen earthworks and looked up at Markgraaf Hive: a teeming termite mound of humanity that rose precipitously into the sky, burning and trailing a banner of smoke.
‘They’re under siege up there,’ her sergeant said, meaning the patrician hive lords of the Richstar family. The sergeant’s name was Fronsak. His regiment, the Cadian 2050th, had been amalgamated with Minka’s the year before. He was a solid commander, with the professional manner typical of the Cadian officer class, and made it his duty to obey orders, take objectives and to keep them all alive, as much as possible. ‘They’re fighting a slow retreat up the hive.’
Minka stretched her head back to take in the mountainous bulk of the hive city. The peak of the massive conglomeration was too high to see with the naked eye. Fronsak handed Minka the magnoculars. She looked up, past the layers of smoke and burning, five miles above her head, to where the isolated white pinnacles and buttresses of the hive sparkled with ice. The hive lords couldn’t have had more than thirty levels left to go before they were driven from the top of their home.
She handed the magnoculars back and looked about. Lines of Chimeras idled as the rest of the Cadian force disembarked, platoon by platoon. Further off, Hydra platforms scanned the sky for any counter-attacks, and over the mounds and heaps of slag, she could see lines of local Calibineer troops filing towards them. They looked weary and stoic, quite unlike the Cadians,
who stood about with a business-like readiness.
And over the slag heaps a procession of skitarii accompanied three huge, tracked transporters that made the files of armour seem as small as beetles upon the plain.
Upon the back of each carriage, tended by servitors and fussing tech-priests, lay a vast tube hastily painted in the colours of the Richstars, the family whose various branches seemed to run this whole sector of Imperial space.
‘What are those?’
‘Hellbores,’ Fronsak said.
Minka said nothing. They looked like armoured tubes set with drill-teeth at one end. Each of the monstrous forgings was large enough to fit a platoon inside. A tunnelling transport that ground its way through earth and bedrock, under fortifications and behind the enemy lines. Which meant they would be sent deep into the heretic territory. A suicide mission if ever she’d seen one.
An hour later her platoon had filed up the ramp into the cramped troop compartments inside the Hellbore. They were rammed in. Face-to-face. Shoulder-to-shoulder. No room to drop a grenade, no way to pull a knife. The doors slammed and locked. A grating whine started as the tunnelling mechanism began to turn, and they were all thrown violently forwards as the Hellbore slid from its mountings and started to drill through the topsoil as easily as ploughing through snow.
The difficulty began when its ceramite teeth came up against bedrock and rockcrete foundations. The grinding mechanism screamed. The tube juddered, and they could hear the rumble of hive-quakes set off by the burrowing. From there on the journey stretched for hours, a gut-wrenching ordeal almost as unpleasant as warp transit. There had been sickening lurches, the constant noise and the habitual terror that their transport might break down or fail, or that a hive-quake might crush them all.
The heat and motion made her feel sick. What if we meet rock too tough to grind through? she thought. A cold sweat covered her hands, her forehead, the small of her back. Her stomach lurched. Her mouth was full of saliva. There was no room for her to vomit, though others did. She swallowed her bile back. It went up her nose. She could not keep it down. She shut her eyes as the stink began to fill the stifling chamber. She prayed to the Throne, to the Omnissiah, to Saint Hallows, the patron saint of Cadia.
Hellbore indeed, she thought, finally realising how apt the name was.
It was almost a relief when the thing finally jolted to a halt, throwing them all forwards into each other. Lights flashed, a klaxon rang, the assault ramps crashed down and they spilled out into the half-collapsed tunnels of the lowest strata of Markgraaf.
There had been no sign of the enemy, just dripping catacombs that dated from the earliest days of the hive. The broken tunnels and sump-holes forced them to break into small units. It was slow-going into a world that had not seen the light of the sun for thousands of years. At first they used lumens, but everything was covered in a thick, wet mould that gave off a faint green luminescence, and once their eyes grew accustomed to its illumination, they saved their power packs for moments of need such as when consulting their maps.
Each squad had been issued with a rudimentary schematic, a rough impression of the hive, with their objective – the Great Chamber – clearly marked. They picked their way along crazed tunnels that meandered away, some collapsed, others flooded, or cut their way through vast pale slugs of congealed fat and filth from the city above, not knowing if they were drawing closer to the centre of the hive or not.
‘What is this Great Chamber?’ Ansen asked at one point.
‘There’s some kind of contraption apparently. Old mine shaft,’ Fronsak told them. ‘It’s the only place where there’s access to the upper levels.’
Or that was what they all had thought. The heretics clearly had other ways down into the underhive, because within hours it seemed that the Imperial counter-attack had been discovered and heretics were swarming into the underhive like rats. They were a motley band of tattooed gangers and underhive scum, drawn from the deepest pits of the mountain-city, their emaciated bodies burning with the conviction of heresy.
The Cadian thrust turned into a nightmarish city-fight in the collapsed intestines of the underhive. Sergeant Fronsak died on the second day of fighting, and there’d been three more sergeants since as the sump-war became a living hell of heretics and rock falls. Life by life the strength of the Cadian 101st was being whittled away, like a cathedral full of candle flames extinguished one by one. The longer it went on, the more Minka felt that she was part of a dying breed, a lost way of life, a species on the edge of extinction.
Now she crouched in this unknown chamber, her ribs aching from the blow the heretic had dealt her. She looked to Sergeant Gaskar. ‘So,’ she said, ‘which way now?’
Frekked if I know, Gaskar’s expression said. He jumped one of the cracks in the rockcrete floor, skirted the side of the water, pulled out his lumen and used it to pick his way round the edge of the flooded end of the chamber. A fallen metal joist blocked the way between two stalactites. It was embedded in pale drip-lime. He clambered over it, brushed the luminous mould off his hand. It was an unconscious gesture that left a glowing smear across his chest. Perfect target for a sniper to aim at. Gaskar clearly thought the same thing. He cursed and rubbed at the smear with the cuff of his sleeve, scratching his chin as if thinking. ‘Looks like the hivers came this way,’ he said, pointing to the far end of the chamber.
He turned and looked at them. From where she sat, Minka could see what Gaskar saw. The squad needed to rest. They were exhausted. You could read it in their faces.
Gaskar spat and pushed his helmet back from his head. ‘All right. Rellan and Aleksei, stand guard. Everyone else, get some rest.’
Grogar and Matrey set up the heavy bolter in the middle of the chamber while Minka found a hole next to Isran where they could watch the pool. Isran was one of those strange creatures who kept his lean body going on a combination of liquor, stimms and lho. He sat with his lasrifle between his legs, his hands folded over the top end, staring out into the darkness. Minka took a ration pack from her breast pocket. The foil seals were broken. She used her nails to pick the foil from the semi-hydrated slab within and held it out. ‘Want some?’
Isran shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said, still staring out into the dark.
There was a tremble in the air. She lifted her hand and felt the vibrations come again, stronger this time. Dust drifted down from a crack in the ceiling and freckled the dark water’s surface. She thought for a moment of the vast, oppressive weight of the hive above her head and wished she hadn’t.
The rumble came again, longer now.
‘Think that’s a hive-quake?’ Minka said.
‘Could be,’ Isran said. His tone said there was nothing they could do about it.
The trembling faded. Minka ate some more. It came back a few moments later. It didn’t sound like hive-quake. But there was another sound. ‘What the hell is that?’ she said. It sounded like wet mouths feeding, out there in the shadows.
‘Rats,’ Isran said. Vermin and battlefields went together. It was nothing to be surprised at.
Minka washed the dehydrated food down with a short swig from her battered tin canteen, then dropped the ration pack to the floor. She looked about. Leonov had shut his eyes, but the rest of them were sitting watching, cleaning their weapons, checking their webbing, smoking lhos. Minka shut her eyes and imagined herself anywhere but here. She found her memory taking her back to a Whiteshield camp in the highlands above Kasr Myrak. She had been only fourteen or so, a young Whiteshield with a head full of dreams of fighting for the Imperium of Man. She remembered how her hair had whipped across her face as she watched the dawn breaking over Cadia, how the rising sun had lit the jagged mountain peaks, before cresting the ridge and bathing the world with light. The sun did not give heat at dawn, but it did give hope, and she closed her eyes and remembered that moment now. Cadia. Sunrise. The promise of another day to
fight against their foes.
The trembling came again. Isran smiled. ‘Maybe that’s our reinforcements coming.’
Minka reached back for the vox. She’d been lugging this useless box around with her ever since the operator, Hama, got himself killed. It was three days ago that they’d last heard anything from HQ, and that had only been some high-ranking idiot giving orders as if there were any order down here to impose. Almost out of boredom she lifted the receiver and flipped it on. There was nothing but static. She tapped it against the wall. The note of the static remained unchanged.
‘Turn that off, will you!’ Artem hissed.
Every squad had a bastard, and Artem was theirs. Minka ignored him.
‘I said, switch it off.’
‘Frekk you,’ Minka told him.
Then Artem was looming up out of the shadows. His eyes were wide and white. They shone in the sickly light of the chamber. He grabbed the vox handset and slammed it against the broken slab of rockcrete. It was Munitorum issue, designed for rough conditions – the toughest the galaxy could throw at them – and the blow barely scratched it.
She gave him a look that said, That’s Munitorum equipment, break it at your peril. But he slammed it against the rock again.
‘Sit down!’ Gaskar told him.
‘Turn the frekking thing off will you!’ he shouted and threw it back at her. ‘It’s useless,’ Artem said. ‘Useless. Understand?’
Minka despised weakness, and she saw how the underhive had broken him. When he came forward she shoved him back, both hands, the heels of her palms connecting with his sternum. ‘Get a hold of yourself!’ she said, but he kept coming, and the third time she reached for her knife. The sharp, ground steel gleamed pale green in the luminous light.
Minka wasn’t letting a frekk-head like Artem screw about with her. Her hand trembled. Not with fear but with fury. She could feel that surge of strength rising through her. ‘Try me,’ she said as he came for her again.
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