‘Lord! Lord, have you come to deliver us? Lord!’
Typhus turned to the screaming woman. She was wretched in every way imaginable: filthy from head to toe with encrusted grime, half her face was blackened by a flesh-eating disease, and her raised hands were mutilated from where she’d eaten her own fingers to stave off starvation.
To the Herald, she was beautiful. Typhus watched her for several moments before she was lost in the press of ravaged humanity surrounding the Death Guard. It was becoming difficult to move through the dense crowd. People so diseased they had no right to be alive pressed in from every direction. The god’s blessing kept them alive and ripe with sickness, on the edge of deaths that would take years of pain to come unless they were put out of their misery first.
Clear a path.+ Typhus’s words wormed into the minds of the Death Guard. A hundred bolters were raised at once, unleashing their fury into the crowd. The crowd dispersed like a tide, fleeing in every direction as the guns of the fallen Astartes reaped scores of lives. Bolt shells detonated in bodies, showering the Death Guard in gobbets of bloody flesh.
The park was soon clear. Typhus was loath to destroy any soul sworn to his master, but this rabble barely counted. Most had pledged their devotion out of panic and confusion. If they died, little was lost. The Herald’s mission meant so much more than the lives of a handful of half-faithful peasants.
Among the buildings nearby, tall figures in black armour moved quietly, watching the advancing Death Guard. They observed in near silence, watching as the rain slashed from the Traitor Astartes’ greenish armour and cleansed the plate of heretic blood.
‘We see them,’ voxed Brother-Captain Corvane Valar.
‘Good hunting,’ replied Captain Thade’s voice in his internal helm speakers. ‘Victory or Death.’
‘Not today, Cadian. Today, it shall be both.’
The Chimeras sat at the edge of the graveyard, lined up in neat rows along a wide avenue. The rain was heavy now, scything into soil that was quickly becoming thick mud. Thade led the column of men, leaving the graveyard through the towering marble archway they’d entered by only hours before.
The squads spread around the tanks, rifles up. No one was there. The street was deserted.
‘No guards,’ said Darrick. ‘Anyone get Valiant on the vox?’
Thade had left fifteen men, Valiant squad, to watch over the thirty troop transports. The possibilities were uniformly unpleasant. Either Valiant had met its end too fast to vox for assistance, or any cries for help had been lost in the maelstrom of the broken vox network.
‘I’ve got blood over here,’ said Corrun, his laspistol drawn. Thade came over to him, his own pistol out and held low in both hands. Thade’s command Chimera, black where the others were a mix of black and grey, had a scarlet smear up one side.
‘No bodies.’ Thade’s skin prickled.
‘Tick-tock,’ Darrick reminded him.
‘Perimeter sweep, and make it fast,’ Thade ordered. The squads checked the immediate area, finding nothing more than a few bloodstains on the ground.
‘I can’t reach Valiant,’ Janden admitted, slinging his patched-up vox-caster on his back. He came over to where Thade stood by the tracks of the command Chimera. ‘Though this isn’t exactly working at peak performance.’
‘I’ve got them,’ a voice crackled over the vox. ‘Throne, they’re in pieces.’
Horlarn’s squad found the fifteen men of Valiant several hundred metres from the Chimeras, within a small enclosed street chapel made of inexpensive white stone that poorly imitated marble. A pilgrim trap, set up by fake relic traders, and now the tomb of almost twenty Guardsmen.
Valiant were indeed in pieces. Their bodies lay limbless and desecrated in a heaped pile, their armour and flesh alike showing evidence of blade wounds and las-fire.
‘Sir,’ Horlarn was backing out of the chapel, voxing the captain. ‘All dead. The Remnant did this.’
‘Damn it,’ breathed Thade. ‘Mount up, we’re leaving. The Raven Guard is engaging the XIV Legion. Astartes or not, there’s no guarantee they can buy us much time.’
The Cadians boarded, and the ramps slammed closed as they made ready to move out. When the tanks rolled away, almost half of them remained behind, uncrewed and unmoving. Once they were underway, Thade joined Corrun in the front of the command Chimera.
‘You know the way to link up with Colonel Lockwood?’
Corrun didn’t take his eyes from the vision slit, watching the buildings speed past.
‘You know I do.’
‘No harm in checking. Vox to the other drivers – when we arrive, we’re going to disembark and be back on board within thirty seconds.’
‘Thirty seconds? What about survivors?’
Thade fixed him with a look that spoke volumes. ‘Just vox it, Corrun. Thirty seconds. We deploy, we reclaim the banner, and we go.’
Corrun complied, and the tanks trundled on. Through wide avenues and slender, winding streets; through abandoned barricades that had stood untouched since the planet’s Enforcers deserted them weeks before. All the while, the vox chattered with intermittent howls of static and indecipherable whispers.
‘We’re getting close, sir,’ Corrun said, pulling into an expansive concourse. The transport started to jostle, treads clawing the tank over mounds of the slain. ‘This was some battle…’
‘I want to see for myself,’ the captain said.
Thade climbed the short ladder to the cupola and pushed it open. He peered out of the hatch, pistol in hand, and activated his vox. The scene resembled a marketplace of detritus and abandoned traders’ carts. As the tanks slowed, Thade emerged to stand on the Chimera’s rain-slick roof, scanning the scene around. The bodies of slain Guardsmen were strewn across the marble-tiled ground, staining the mosaic patterns across the floor dark and unrecognisable with blood. The bodies of Remnant were spread in far greater numbers, punctuated here and there by the hulking form of a slain Traitor Astartes.
He took it in with a tactician’s eye. There was little order here, hardly any signs of how the battle had ebbed and flowed. It had been fast. The 88th had been encircled from the outset and cut down in the ranks they formed to repel the assault. Thade knew the colonel’s Sentinels would be out of sight, almost certainly destroyed as the enemy first came upon them before engaging the main force.
‘Thade to Eighty-eighth,’ he said as his eyes sought every detail of the scene, drinking it all in. Faces he recognised, drawn in death, bodies and uniforms soaked in blood and the rain. ‘Be ready to deploy, weapons hot, on my order. Venator squad will go for the prize. Everyone else, stand ready.’
Corrun drove through the mess of dead soldiers, the Chimera’s treads hissing as they splashed through the thin, orange fluid of rainwater and blood. There it was. The banner. Thade’s gaze fixed on the fallen banner atop a small mound of slaughtered soldiers, the fabric itself stained and soaked through.
A burned-out husk of a Chimera, as black as Thade’s own, sizzled in the rainfall. The nuance was not lost on Thade: it was a blunt premonition of things to come.
And the banner was on the ground only twenty metres from it. Ragged, ruined and filthy. It lay like a blanket across the body of the last man to carry it, its rain-darkened surface distorted by the lumps of the corpse it covered.
‘Corrun, kill the engine. Venator squad, deploy. The banner is by Colonel Lockwood’s transport, twenty steps north. Go.’
The men spilled out.
‘Courage, Adamant, Defiance and Liberation,’ Thade named the squads he knew were suffering with low ammo. ‘Deploy and scavenge for what you need.’
The other squads deployed. Thade watched them taking magazines from the dead. His attention remained mostly on Kel and his Whiteshields. They didn’t balk at the duty. That was something, at least.
‘Can you see Lockwood?�
�� voxed Darrick.
‘Don’t ask,’ Thade replied. He recognised Lockwood’s corpse by the silver trim on the charred corpse’s shoulder armour. It was lying half out of the destroyed Chimera’s turret hatch, a pistol and sword on the transport’s roof out of reach of its blackened, outstretched hands.
Thade moved to the edge of the roof and leaped down to the ground. His boots splashed filthy water in a spray as he landed.
‘Sir,’ crackled the vox to the percussion of clanking feet in the background.
‘Copy, Greer.’ Then he swallowed. Greer was dead; he’d seen him die.
‘This is Vertain, sir.’
‘My apologies. Interference and… Thade here. Go.’
‘Enemy sighted. We’ll need to make this fast. Looks like plague-slain coming down the avenue to the west.’
‘Numbers?’
‘Hundreds. We’ve got a few minutes, they’re just shambling.’
Thade ran over to the wrecked Chimera, near where his command squad were reverently lifting the banner, squeezing the water from the thick fabric and furling it for retrieval. He climbed the side ladder to the tank’s roof, kneeling to pick up Colonel Lockwood’s bolt pistol.
Lockwood watched him perform this indignity, rapt with an eyeless stare, blackened face locked in a wide-jawed and silent scream.
‘Need the clips, sir?’ Tasoll asked as he finished rolling the banner up. Thade didn’t answer. He looted Lockwood’s burned corpse the way the other squads were looting their slain brethren, adding Lockwood’s unspent bolter magazines to his own dwindling supply. Using a spare holster from his webbing, he strapped the colonel’s pistol to his other thigh.
Thade moved back to his Chimera alongside Venator. Throne, did he ever want to leave. It wasn’t that the carnage-rich site of this last stand unnerved him. It was that he didn’t want to join the rest of the regiment here.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said to his squad. He voxed the same words to everyone still alive in the regiment once he was back on board.
‘Vertain, maintain the mobile perimeter. We’re rolling.’
‘Copy, sir.’
Darrick voxed again. ‘Private channel. Horlarn said you took the colonel’s gun.’
Thade glanced down at the second bolt pistol at his hip. It was ornate for Cadian wargear, edged in shining bronze with an ivory grip. The whole regiment knew the story behind how Lockwood had come by it. Like Thade’s silver medal, it was a point of pride for the 88th – one of their symbols.
‘I took it, yes.’
‘Good,’ Darrick said, and left it at that.
Thade gripped the overhead handrail and moved to where Janden and Tasoll were cleaning the banner as best they were able. Zailen was near them both, on his back, looking up at the roof. His breathing came in doglike pants through purpling lips. Thade clicked his fingers to get Tasoll’s attention, and flicked a glance at Zailen. Tasoll shook his head.
‘Zailen,’ Thade said, crouching by the wounded man.
‘Cap,’ he said. Blood flecked his lips. Not a good sign.
‘I’m sorry, but the formal record of the Reclamation is going to say how you got gutshot just to have some time off.’
Zailen managed a grin, blinking his eyes three times to focus. He was doped-up nicely, Thade knew, but the fact he wasn’t screaming with the pain of the belly wound was the best evidence of that.
‘Darrick already used that line on me, sir.’
‘Well, forget Darrick. I outrank him. My threats mean more.’ He turned to Tasoll and Janden, watching them rinse the banner, fighting an uphill battle to dry it out. The decking floor of the transport was wet with the bloody water they had squeezed from the flag so far. Thade ordered Trooper Iaun, who was performing a whispered Rite of Maintenance on his lasrifle, to sweep the water out using spare uniforms from the supply trunks under the seating benches.
Tasoll fingered a hole in the banner. It was a las-burn, scorching the surrounding fabric black.
‘No respect, eh?’
‘Hold it up,’ Thade said. ‘Let’s see the damage.’
The banner’s background was quartered grey and black, with the edges decked in silver rope. The centre symbol was the traditional emblem representing the Cadian Gate, an angular arch detailed in silver thread, with the fortress-world itself in the centre. A golden corona framed the top of the arch. Beneath it were the words ‘CADIAN 88th – FOR HOME AND THE THRONE, FOR CADIA AND THE EMPEROR.’
A smaller banner hung attached to the bottom right corner – the banner of the Kasrkin of Kasr Vallock who were traditionally seconded to the regiment. It mirrored the larger crest on the main banner, though the Cadian gate was done in dark grey instead of silver, and it had an additional message: ‘NEVER FALL, NEVER SURRENDER, NEVER OUTNUMBERED, NEVER OUTGUNNED.’
It was, by the standards of most Imperial Guard banners, rather muted and subtle.
It was also ruined, scored by a dozen small holes from las-fire, ripped in several places, discoloured and stinking from both bloodstains and rainwater, and missing most of the silver rope that had decorated the edges. It had seen many better days, and few worse ones.
‘Still looks proud, though,’ Tasoll said, guessing the captain’s thoughts easily enough.
‘For Home and the Throne,’ Thade smiled, then turned to Zailen again. ‘You’re not getting out of work just yet.’
‘Fine by me… it means I’m still getting paid.’ Zailen smiled. His face was so pale and drawn he looked like a skull. Thade refrained from mentioning that to him.
‘We’ll lock you in here,’ the captain said, ‘with Janden’s vox-caster.’
‘I understand, sir.’
Thade nodded. Zailen wouldn’t survive an hour, but at least he’d die doing his duty.
‘Coming up on the monastery,’ Corrun called over his shoulder.
‘Copy. Dead Man’s Hand, any problems ahead?’
‘Looks clear, sir,’ Vertain voxed. ‘Clear all the way to the monastery’s grounds.’
‘Let’s pray it stays that way.’
It didn’t.
The plague-slain were out in force that night. A massive horde of the walking dead milled around the front grounds of the monastery; some quiet and still, others weeping and raving into the night sky.
The 88th hit them with the force of a thunderclap. Seventeen Chimeras tore into the garden grounds, laser turrets wailing and chopping the dead to pieces. Heavy bolters on the front of the transports – cautiously unused for so much of the campaign – opened up with barking chatter, no longer silenced by Reclamation protocol. The explosive bolts scythed the plague-slain down in droves, and filled the cold air with sprays of even colder gore.
Thade rode his Chimera as he had stood on it before, atop the roof, both bolters drawn. He held the colonel’s weapon in his human hand, clenching his own pistol in his augmetic fist. No sign of the Death Guard – neither the advance elements already on the planet, nor the Herald’s own warriors who had landed hours before. There was still a chance the 88th had made it here first. The Raven Guard had presumably delayed the XIV Legion, but no contact had been established with Valar and his Astartes since they’d first engaged the Herald.
The tanks bumped and jostled as they crushed fallen curse victims. Thade kept his balance, voxing on the general channel.
‘88th, deploy as ordered.’ As he spoke the words, Thade holstered one of his pistols and crouched, gripping a handrail with one hand, firing with the bolter in the other.
It was as close to perfect as they were ever going to be able to do in the circumstances. With too many tanks and too little room to manoeuvre, the drivers wrenched their vehicles into a near-perfect performance of Opening the Eye. Tracks rumbled, gang-ramps slammed down, and the last surviving platoons of the Cadian 88th disembarked with rifles up and firing.
&
nbsp; The horde of plague-slain was rent apart less than a minute after the first Chimera entered the grounds.
The Chimeras were locked and sealed, left parked in their star pattern. The 88th formed up. At the head of the formation, Thade drew both his pistols again.
‘Thade to Zailen.’
‘Here, sir,’ came the vox-reply from the wounded man still aboard the Chimera.
‘Begin.’
Every vox-bead in the regiment clicked live. Zailen’s voice was strained and distorted, but all the more earnest for those facts as he spoke the Litany of Courage into Janden’s vox-caster.
‘…forever in defiance, we stand true to Him on Earth…’
Thade spoke over the continuing litany, using it as a quiet backdrop as he voxed his orders. At the last, as his remaining squads stood to attention, steeling themselves before entering the monastery, Thade spoke again.
‘We’ve got one chance to do this right. One chance to make sure every soul that died aboard the lost fleet, every soldier that died in the city today, and every citizen that died in the plague weeks ago… didn’t die in vain.
‘One chance.’ He let the words hang.
‘We’re going into the catacombs. Then deeper, into the foundations. Then, if we can, we’re going deeper still. The XIV Legion killed this world, this holiest of planets, and we failed to make them pay. Something under this monastery has been calling to the Herald. The Herald has answered. He comes now.
‘We have one chance to beat him to the prize he seeks, one chance to kill whatever he’s come to find. You know what we seek: the Heresy-era battleship Aggrieved. You know what we risk: everything and nothing, for all we have left to give is the breath we draw, and the blood in our veins.
‘This is our one last chance to stand together before we die how we knew we always would – in service to Cadia and the God-Emperor.’
Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 21
