Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  He turned to meet the second as she tried to rush him from the other side. The crackling tip of her power lash snapped around his left wrist, locking itself off. To any ordinary man, the mere touch of the weapon would feel like wearing a set of manacles pulled from a blacksmith’s fire. It wasn’t exactly a concubine’s caress for Mortensen either but his benumbed flesh gave him the seconds he needed to withstand the worst the lash had to offer. Grabbing a length of whip with one hand he yanked the sister towards him, swinging his right fist around to meet her. With the second sister on the deck Mortensen uncoiled the power lash from his wrist and brought it back to life with a click of his thumb.

  The blistered sinew of his wrist smouldered and Mortensen clenched both his fist and his teeth as the ghostly scorch of the searing weapon finally hit nerve sensitive tissue underneath. The first sister held back, allowing her compatriot time to shake Mortensen’s jackhammer blow from her skull; they remained together, side by side. What they had just witnessed made them wary: his gift, his curse.

  Mortensen gave them a nasty smirk. When a comet had struck the hive-world of Gomorrah, Mortensen had been baptised in the apocalyptic fires that had laid waste to the planet. He had been burned from the temple to the toes and had lost much of the feeling in what was in between.

  The three of them circled each other like gladiatorial warriors, the sisters occasionally cracking their remaining lash at him in the hope he might return the compliment and provide them with an opening. When he had them where he wanted them, Mortensen granted their wish. The battle-sisters effortlessly sidestepped as Mortensen slid down on one knee and sent the tip of the spitting weapon harmlessly through the air between them. Like scorpions rearing their tails for the kill, the sisters took full advantage and thrashed their own whip towards him. But it was too late. Mortensen’s weapon was already entangled itself in its intended target – the centre leg of the plasteel table. Tugging at the lash with all his strength, the table shot across the room, hamstringing the two women from behind and sending them tumbling towards the metal floor.

  With the Adepta Sororitas down, Mortensen had expected the remaining battle-sister to go for her pistol again. Fading power pack or not, the weapon was still better than nothing. Sending a ripple through his power lash, he freed it from the table leg and announced his intention to fight.

  Within moments the prone battle-sisters were back on their feet and forming a living, breathing barrier of righteous hatred between Mortensen and their brash leader. He gave them a brazen flash of his eyes: ‘Don’t know when to stay down eh? Or maybe you’re getting to like it…’

  They advanced, impassive and unruffled. Mortensen’s smirk faded. He was being toyed with: a puritan’s plaything. The battle-sisters were soaking up punishment like a barrack room punch bag, each blow taking them one step closer to the redemption they craved. Mortensen, on the other hand, had been to hell and back way before he ever reached the cell and was starting to question how much more abuse he could conceivably weather. The answer to his question came sooner than he thought.

  ‘Stand down,’ the battle-sister instructed, at which her henchwomen went limp and peeled off to stand sentinel on either side of the oubliette. She wanted to face him alone. Mortensen gave a mock bow of the head, as if he and the battle-sister were facing each other across a spire ballroom.

  ‘Obliged to you,’ he said, cracking his knuckles and moving in on her. Disconcertingly, all the battle-sister did was saunter around the front of the table and rest her backside on the rim.

  That wasn’t the only thing that was bothering Mortensen. His fourth step hadn’t felt as steady as his third and his fifth barely carried him at all. Finding himself back on the floor at the battle-sister’s feet, Mortensen started to realise that he was in trouble. Again. Gritting his teeth and abandoning the whip, he took the last few metres arm over arm, before pulling himself up using the side of the table and the sister’s holster belt. His legs felt like they weren’t there anymore and he began to feel the same sensation in his arms. If he could just get his hands around her neck – but that thought faded as his eyes came level with the battle-sister’s elegant laspistol.

  ‘Needler,’ Mortensen grunted, and fell as the palsy reached his straining fingers.

  He hit the filth-encrusted floor with less grace than he would have imagined possible, before getting on with the important business of internal cramping and convulsions. It was difficult to concentrate during this period, but Mortensen was certain that he heard the slick clunk of a pistol longslide being cleared. This was confirmed a muscle-spasming eternity later when a crystal casing hit the floor next to him. The tiny transparent vial, threaded through with a violaceous liquid, rolled this way and that in the miniature squall of his staggered breathing. Flipping him over with the wicked tip of one armoured boot, the battle-sister took him away from the kaleidoscopic world of the needler chemicase and stood astride his paralysed form.

  ‘Be gentle with me,’ Mortensen jeered and managed a crooked smirk. The freshly primed needler came out and hovered once again above his chest.

  ‘Don’t worry, major,’ she assured him, the cold certainty of her words cutting through his hive-world smarm. ‘You won’t feel a thing.’

  Chapter One

  Damnation Games

  I

  It was the same dream.

  Mortensen knew it was a dream because he was home and the home he knew was long gone. Knee-deep in fine caustic ash, he was stumbling his way up a mountainous dune. His drill slacks were sweat-stained rags clinging to his brawny frame and his feet were raw in his boots. Spreading his fingers like grapnels, he punched handholds into the desiccated slip face and made a desperate scramble for the dune’s shifting summit.

  Gomorrah.

  He drank in a scene of unrivalled bleakness. A rolling dune sea of corrosive, crescentric slag-heaps as far as the eye could see – pockmarked with industrial craters and bottomless, open-cast scars that even the insatiable ash wasteland couldn’t swallow. And where this blighted landscape met a primordial sky that boiled with sickly rage, a bloated city sat, spewing further poison into the rust-scorched heavens. Haephastus Hive squatted like some industrial behemoth, its prospector shanty towns slipping between the bleached dunes like exploratory tentacles, searching for the next motherlode, the next heavy metal seam or horde of long forgotten archeotech.

  Behind him, the ‘Claw’ poked an accusatory set of masonry pincers at the filthy heavens. Mortensen had no idea what the architectural abomination had been in its former life, but now the two towers – the shorter leaning with seeming precariousness on its grotesquely lofty counterpart – formed the two vertical chromo-wings of Gomorrah’s infamous schola progenium complex. Atop the tallest, Drill Abbot Proctor would be observing his progress across the dunes; chronometer in one bony fist, magnoculars to his beady little eyes, his toothless chops mumbling an incessant stream of senile curses. Knowing his momentary pause would have sent the good abbot into an apoplexy of eyeball-popping profanity, Mortensen dragged his limbs from the strength-sapping ash: he would pay for that.

  Lost in the grim spectacle of the hive he barely noticed when the spent, feeble sunlight suddenly evaporated. A deathly coolness swept across the barren waste as the cloudbank above Mortensen was enveloped in angry, black shadow. As he stared into the deepening sky the perverse eddies and twisters responsible for the dunes’ seasonal migration died about him and the air grew still and lifeless.

  On the horizon, just beyond the mighty hive, a colossal berg of dirty ice and rock suddenly split the sky asunder. Mortensen had never seen anything as big – not even the hive – and for a long moment the only expression his body could produce was an awe-inspired gawp. For the first time in sixteen hours, Mortensen was confident that Abbot Proctor’s magnoculars were not burning into his sweaty back.

  As the gargantuan object fell it writhed with white flame and trailed
a firestorm of friction and combustible atmospheric gases. Cloud vaporised on contact and sheet lightning rippled out in concentric waves, as what Mortensen could only imagine was a comet breached the percolating smog layers and tumbled towards the surface. In the appalling seconds of helpless horror that followed, Mortensen found himself ghoulishly shuffling towards the vision.

  Then impact.

  All became agonising white as the comet struck and announced its unwelcome arrival. Mortensen instinctively screwed his eyes shut and so couldn’t see the unstoppable blast wave as it tore across the world in the wake of the strike, scalding the skies and turning the wasteland to glass.

  He felt it though. A sensation he would never be allowed to forget: a corporeal memory; the last feeling his flesh would ever register. The inferno rolled over him like a tidal wave of superheated vengeance, flensing skin from the muscle and sinew underneath and baptising what was left in the apocalyptic fires that followed. Thrashing in an acid bath of agony, Mortensen screamed for a death that never came…

  II

  Zane Mortensen sat bolt upright in the bunk, gulping feverishly at the cool air of the quarters. Dragging back the blanket he threw his legs over the side and dug the soles of his feet into the metal of the deck. Deliverance felt cold: the deep freeze of the empyrean creeping through the escort carrier’s superstructure. With warp travel came nightmares, as every good Guardsman knew, but for Mortensen this was normal fare. That monstrous calamity waited for him behind each eyelid: for him sleep meant reliving the unliveable. Cradling his brutally shaved head in his hands he let the ghostly afterimage of the dream fade from his mind.

  There was movement in the covers beside him. He watched a slender hand reach out groggily before letting soft fingers drift in mock affection across the taut muscle of one scarred shoulder. It was Vedette, one of his storm-troopers. The arrangement was largely casual, unspoken and restricted to the long months spent in transit between one warzone and the next.

  The simple warmth of the action was lost on Mortensen’s nerve-dead flesh, the difference between what he could see and feel making him nauseous, and he brushed her delicate fingers from his arm. She moaned softly and retracted, turning over in the bunk.

  ‘Sir.’

  The bulkhead rolled aside and the glowtubes glimmered to life. Corporal Sass stood in the entrance looking more stricken than usual. Mortensen squinted through the harsh glare. Sass took a couple of dramatic steps inside the cabin. ‘Major, we have a problem.’

  Mortensen gave the young hiver crabby eyes. ‘I already have a problem, corpsman.’ He stuffed a cigar butt between his teeth. ‘You.’

  The storm-trooper continued his vexed advance, to the major’s dismay. Mortensen had a soft spot for the Necromundan, but he was wound tighter than a tripwire. The boy’s prodigious mathematical abilities and indefatigable memory – the consequence of his mother’s taste for crystal ersatz – was a bottomless pit of Tactica protocol, field stratagems and strangely useful useless information. This made Sass an invaluable asset and a perfect choice for the major’s adjutant.

  ‘You should really hear this, sir.’

  Slipping on his boots, beret and a pair of starched blood stripe slacks, Mortensen crossed the cabin and pushed his bulkhead aside. To the officer’s surprise he found Master Sergeant Conklin playing sentry at the door: beret crooked and resting the snub muzzle of an autopistol against the cold metal.

  ‘What?’ Mortensen rumbled as the sergeant raised his grizzled eyebrows.

  ‘You’re not gonna like this, boss.’

  Bulldozer loyalty was Wendall Conklin’s speciality: he was well liked amongst the men, among whom his reputation as Mortensen’s top hatchet man was legend and the bark of his bolter was always welcome. Mortensen couldn’t find it in himself to like the man, however. Under fire he often found himself deferring to the cold logic of his adjutant or Vedette’s cool common sense, rather than the brute killer instincts of his veteran sergeant – utterly dependable though he was.

  ‘I’m already not liking it.’

  Mortensen took in the corridor with one suspicious glance and then pinned the two storm-troopers with wary eyes. ‘What is it?’ he put to them in single and deliberate syllables. One looked at the other in expectation. Sass twitched. Conklin flared his nostrils. ‘Am I in the habit of asking rhetorical questions?’ the major added with rising choler.

  The master sergeant’s face creased with addled irritation. He wasn’t much one for long words or their meanings.

  Sass raised an inquiring finger: ‘Sir, would that not be a rhetorical question?’

  Mortensen growled.

  Sass lowered his finger and took it towards the cabin vox. ‘Like I said, sir, you are going to want to hear this for yourself.’

  The wall-caster erupted in a cacophony of static and garbled vox-traffic. For a few seconds the ear-splitting scramble continued with Mortensen glowering at his adjutant, his patience almost spent. Then he caught something he recognised – something all Guardsmen recognised – the nineteen megathule, air-seething crack of ragged las-fire and the screams that usually accompanied it.

  Mortensen put his hand to the wall and leaned in closer with his experienced ear. Volscian-pattern. Hive produced. Unrivalled power economy and the almost indistinguishable hiss of gas-coolant that preceded each snap – both of which were peculiar to the model.

  This was not good news. Volscian-pattern las-fire meant that the firefight wasn’t part of some horrific, empyreal boarding action – which ironically might have been simpler. Volscian las-fire meant Volscians and Deliverance’s payload was the 364th and 1001st Volscian Shadow Brigade companies. As Sass thumbed through the vox-channels it became apparent that the entire carrier was alive with profanity and gunfire. The whoops of trigger-happy Volscian hivers cut through the las-chatter of barrack-room battles and ambushes. Sinister threats and promises were being exchanged across the channels, which had been jammed open on all decks, accompanied by the thudding whoosh of pistols and the occasional thunder of grenades. Fortunately such small arms posed no danger to the reinforced hull and its pressurised integrity.

  ‘They have their weapons,’ Vedette said. She was out of the bunk and pulling on a vest over her bleached, Mordian bob. ‘Which means the officers are involved, also.’

  Sass and the major nodded in grave agreement.

  ‘Gang war?’ Conklin offered. ‘The tats and sashes – Underbloods this and Kinfolk that–’

  ‘The Volscians are undoubtedly stratified by House and gang loyalties,’ Sass interrupted with nerdish authority, ‘but it seems unlikely that a force so divided – so intent on fighting each other rather than the greenskins – could have garrisoned the Kintessa Gauntlet for the past thousand years.’

  Conklin shot the adjutant a sour glare.

  ‘Come on,’ Mortensen snarled, silencing the wall-hailer. ‘We all know it’s Fosco.’ He stared at the floor for a moment, collecting his thoughts, and then looked at them each in turn.

  ‘Sass – I’m going to need Captain Rask.’

  ‘But all this deck’s channels are jammed.’

  ‘Get the master vox from Diederick’s bunk.’ The comms-officer was always fiddling with the damn thing. ‘Patch into the brigadier’s personal channel. If Rask’s not messed up in this then you’ll find him monitoring the vox-waves.’

  ‘Brigadier Voskov’s personal channel is going to be security encoded,’ Sass protested.

  ‘Something makes me think that’s not going to stop you,’ the major told him with a reassuring slap on the back. ‘Hurry.’

  As the adjutant slipped out of the cabin Mortensen turned on his sergeant. ‘Weapons?’

  ‘Hellguns, targeters and carapace are all stowed on the birds. The carrier deck officers have the hangars in lockdown.’

  ‘How do we know that?’ Mortensen asked: that kind of informati
on certainly wasn’t coming in over the vox-channels.

  ‘Minghella was up in medical, checking on Diederick, when it broke out,’ Conklin informed him. ‘Bunch of hivers stormed the bay and shot up the infirmary. Diederick took two more in the chest but Rhen got him back down here. They had to go around the flight deck. Navy boys have sealed themselves in.’

  ‘And Sergeant Minghella?’ Mortensen put to Conklin. The major had the feeling he was going to need his medic.

  ‘Nothing he won’t walk away from,’ the master sergeant assured him. ‘He’s working on Diederick now. All we have are our side arms.’ Conklin flashed his autopistol at the major. The corpsmen carried side arms at all times for personal defence. The pistols were as much uniform as the blood stripes, berets, belts and tunics that made his storm-troopers the target of colourful nicknames amongst regular Guardsmen. To the Shadow Brigade they were ‘Glory Boys’ and ‘Toy Soldiers’ – but this bothered the major and his men little. They’d been called a lot worse and in turn had far worse names for their regimental counterparts: men who fought for tithes and out of fear rather than for Imperial pride.

  Mortensen bridled: his squad might very well have the honour of reinstating some of that fear today. A duty he’d be far happier to perform without the involvement of Commissar Fosco.

  Fosco had joined Deliverance at St Guise, spelling immediate doom for the tiny carrier. Brigadier Voskov already had the Volscian 364th Shadow Brigade drilled into as well-oiled a machine as any officer could come to expect from a hive-world regiment. Besides Mortensen’s storm-troopers, Deliverance also carried the Volscian 1001st and it was the unfortunate honour of this freshly processed regiment to receive as their commissar the infamous Fritzel Fosco.

  Mortensen didn’t know whether it was the strange warp currents the carrier had beat up through on its arduous trek along the Kintessa Gauntlet or the fact that Fosco was a creed-obsessed psychotic who had simply spent too long in the cardinal world hellhole that was St Guise, but it had swiftly become apparent that they were all on a passage to mutiny.