Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  Peering over one of the heavy stubbers, Krieg spotted an all but empty landing pad situated on the roof of one of the complex buildings below. Any atmospheric-capable craft had long left the incarcetorium behind. The only transportation remaining was Rosenkrantz’s indomitable Spectre and two Valkyrie carriers – bearing the sinister insignia of the Ecclesiarchy – that squatted on the pad flanked by bolter-clutching battle-sisters standing sentinel on the strip.

  Ducking back below, Krieg slipped into one of the console bucket chairs and began scanning the porthole pict-casters. Many showed empty corridors and abandoned compounds. The rest revealed the dire living conditions of the inmates’ cells. Prisoners stomped back and forth – like caged animals – which of course, they were. Others hammered on the cell doors with simple bowls and spoons indicating that the present crisis had superseded mealtime in the incarcetorium. Others still were simply trashing the sparse furniture of their cells and throttling their cell mates.

  It didn’t take long to locate the Redemption Corps storm-troopers: a set of pict-casters two banks down were hard to ignore, flashing sporadically with every burst of fire from the Adepta Sororitas’s bolters. He shouldn’t have been surprised that the storm-troopers were out of their cells: Krieg himself had secured his liberty at the earliest opportunity and the corpsmen were used to busting targets out of places like the incarcetorium. The corpsmen had managed to lay their hands on a number of laspistols and the odd rifle, snatched from sentry posts and fleeing security personnel, but they were no match for the thunder of bolters and the clean, cold tactics of the battle-sisters. Gouts of plasma and streams of flame wouldn’t be argued with and the troopers had been corralled in an access corridor with a security bulkhead at their backs, blocking their only escape route.

  Fortunately for them Krieg could do something about that. Laying the bolt pistol on the console and rubbing the stupor from his eyes he scanned the forest of switches and toggles controlling the bulkheads and security accessways, trying to match the code on the porthole pict-casters to their designated controls. Flicking a succession of heavy buttons and not altogether sure if they were correct, Krieg swooped back in on the pict-caster to observe the fruits of his labours. In the grainy capture the cadet-commissar watched the bulkhead shudder and roll slowly towards the ceiling. The storm-troopers didn’t wait and after the briefest of checks began shimmying backwards under the heavy metal door, their weapons still giving the Sisters of the Immaculate Flame something to think about.

  On an adjacent capture Krieg spotted Rosenkrantz a little further up the passage. She was pulling on Pontiff Preed’s priestly robes, trying to get him back to the yawning bulkhead. It was hard to believe that Krieg had initially missed the hulking ecclesiarch: he almost filled the entire pict-caster with his corpulent bulk. The commissar felt sorry for the priest. Like himself, Preed had been caught in the middle of this unholy mess. He was a member of the Ecclesiarchy and the battle-sisters were the priesthood’s militant arm. His loyalties should have been with the Sisters of the Immaculate Flame. They clearly weren’t, however, as evidenced in his brutal treatment of any of their number that came within his reach.

  He might have been huge but his reflexes were excellent. Hiding at a junction, with his back flat to the dun metal wall – not easy for a man of his dimensions – he was waiting for the smoking nozzle of a flamer to creep around the corner. Krieg could see the Aphonac-Stack Probist coming, of course, but the pontiff’s timing was perfect.

  Snatching the stubby barrel of the flamer he yanked the gaunt zealot attached to it around the corner of the junction, using his irresistible centre of gravity to propel the figure into the opposite wall with uncompromising, brute force. The militiaman’s bare skull smacked into the harsh metal; he half-bounced, half-staggered backwards before falling against the opposite wall.

  Turning the flamer back down the opposite corridor, Preed unleashed an inferno at the oncoming sisters and their troops. Grabbing a fat stub gun stuck in the belt of the Frater’s filthy robes, Rosenkrantz tore at the monstrous ecclesiarch’s arm, finally getting him to back towards the open bulkhead, the remaining corpsmen shouting them on.

  With the priest and the pilot through Krieg activated the bulkhead once again. As a security gate, it came down much faster than it had opened – a lethal velocity created by the slackening of gears and the intervention of gravity. As well it might, Preed’s promethium bath had done little to slow the battle-sisters’ advance. The remaining Probists stumbled about the flaming corridor, bumping into the walls and each other before succumbing to the inferno. Krieg watched the sisters simply march through the firestorm in their menacing black body armour and prepare a melta bomb for the bulkhead. The bulkheads weren’t going to be enough.

  Scanning the controls for something else he could use, the cadet-commissar’s eyes fell across the porthole pict-casters with their motley array of murderers and madmen baying for their freedom. The prisoners.

  Watching the corpsmen running for their lives along the accessway on the next capture along, Krieg dropped another bulkhead behind them. Not a moment too soon: the melta bomb had done its job and had turned the first into a ragged hole of molten slag. Sisters were pouring through, their bolter rounds peppering the reinforced bulkhead closing before them.

  One after another, Krieg stabbed at a sequence of chunky buttons, opening the cell doors on the corridor in which the battle-sisters were trapped. The doors rolled aside in unison on ancient hydraulics and the cells disgorged a deluge of human detritus into the corridor. A mob of emaciated insanity and evil packed the passageway, each man intent on securing his freedom at all costs. For some that cost was fairly immediate, the battle-sisters cutting through the swathe of filth-faced villainy with their bolters. Soon enough, however it was wall to wall convicts in there and the battle-sisters had to contend with an unstoppable rabble of desperate men crawling over their bodies and clawing at their weaponry.

  Running his finger across a dimly lit schematic of the incarcetorium complex on the observation deck wall, Krieg went about clearing a route for the storm-troopers all the way up to the roof-top landing pad. All other areas of the prison he flooded with freshly liberated convicts intent on creating their own brand of mayhem and setting upon anyone else with a furious onslaught of frustration and anger. With just about everyone else evacuated, that meant almost exclusively the Sisters of the Immaculate Flame.

  This got Krieg thinking. Cell-block Gamma, Medical Officer Crayne had said. The pict-casters didn’t cover the solitary confinement oubliettes. There would be no point – most of the time the cells were kept in complete darkness. Krieg didn’t need to see Zane Mortensen to know where he was being held. A solitary Celestian stood on guard beside one of the oubliettes’ pressure sealed trapdoors: it seemed that denying their inmates oxygen as well as light and company was part of the regime in solitary confinement. It was the canoness’s personal bodyguard. Krieg had seen her many times before: she had an odd face, her big bright eyes too wide apart. She never smiled, nor spoke and despite looking to all intents and purposes like a fourteen-year-old girl, wore a suit of the most ancient, priceless armour of her order. She clutched a massive adamantium crusader shield – some kind of ancient relic – and was never far from her mistress.

  He would have to find a way to deal with her. Smashing the general alarm with his fist, Krieg filled the entire complex with klaxons, alarm bells and screaming sirens. Then leaving one route through the incarcetorium clear of the full-scale riot that had engulfed the rest of the complex, he snatched up the bolt pistol and limped for Cell-block Gamma.

  Chapter Five

  The Devil’s Boondocks

  I

  Like a ghost ship Dread Sovereign rode the swells and troughs of the Spetzghastian stratosphere, tossed this way and that in the turbulence of low orbit. Almost spectral in the powerful stealth fields that bathed her streamlined hull, the corvette haunt
ed the skies above the massive mercantile world.

  Krieg formed a silhouette against the cloister deck’s stained glass observation port, legs apart and hands behind his back. The thin, azure brilliance of Spetzghast flooded in through the clear glass forming St. Valeria the Younger’s crusader shield and threatened to swallow him whole. Beyond, Spetzghast’s mighty ring system dominated: the planet’s system of multitudinous shepherd moons keeping the miasma of tumbling rock and ice in check. Here, the jaundiced smear that was Algernon sat suspended like a bad omen, with the battle-scarred surface of Illium passing nearby – crossing the terminator into a brief Spetzghastian night. Below the corvette was the object of his fascination: the naval carrier Deliverance, hanging like a bird of prey over one of the mercantile world’s polar mega-sprawls.

  After several hours of gum-spittle castigation and tongue-lashing from an unusually animated Udeskee about almost getting himself killed on his first day, the regimental commissar had given Krieg an administrative errand to run on the Purgatorio. Leaving his superior to vent further wrath on Guardsmen Snyder and Goinz, who had been summoned to the commissar’s quarters after him, Krieg made for his transport. Undoubtedly Udeskee would finish what Krieg himself had started on the fabricator moon and devise suitable punishments for the men. Dead or alive, they were to be made an example of.

  Instead of the flagship, however, the humpshuttle he was supposed to be piggy-backing set out worryingly for the blank carpet of deep space in between two of Spetzghast’s main rings – the so called Quirini Division. Here under its stealth shielding, Dread Sovereign was waiting for him.

  He was escorted straight to the colossal cloister decks of the Adepta Sororitas – somewhere he’d never been before – and told to wait outside Canoness Santhonax’s personal chambers.

  The great bronze doors rolled aside on dampeners and Krieg turned to find himself being approached by a solitary figure leaving the chambers. She wore a tight-fitting body glove of obsidian sheen that jealously clung to every curve, leaving next to nothing to the imagination, and sable robes of some lighter-than-air material that streamed behind her like a trail of smoke. When light from the cloister lamps finally invaded her elegant hood the cadet-commissar was finally privy to the ebony lustre of the stranger’s face. It wasn’t the joy the rest of her body had been: half had the bewitching Imperial dignity of discipline and importance; the rest was a collapsed mess of sunken bone, knotted muscle and the rumpled flesh that covered it.

  She in turn displayed absolutely no interest in the cadet-commissar: her eyes never deviating from their intended course along the cloister deck and within moments she was gone, her strident steps taking her out of sight.

  ‘Enter,’ came that burnished voice: its lightest touch commanding immediate obedience. Santhonax.

  The canoness’s personal chambers were a vaulted realm of devotion and shadow. Ancient artefacts adorned the walls, relics of priceless Imperial history balanced on isolated plinths, tapestries dangled from the dizzying ceiling illustrating the order’s innumerable wars of faith. Krieg’s boots clicked across flagstones of jet that shattered into a mosaic in the centre of the chamber depicting St. Valeria the Younger and the Nine Virgins of the Apocalyse.

  ‘My personal collection,’ Santhonax told the commissar as she joined him from the shadows. Krieg surveyed the canoness’s collection of arch-heretics and iconoclasts. ‘I’m sure that you’ve heard of the infamous Cardinal Krabbé,’ Santhonax said as she passed an aged cleric in shredded, blood-soaked robes. He was hanging from the ceiling on a set of wicked hooks and chains that were embedded in his back-flesh from his scalp to his shins. His encrusted beard dangled towards a gently gathering pool of literal blood, sweat and tears.

  The canoness pushed him gently as she passed, eliciting a desperate moan from the heretic as he gently rocked and the hooks went to work on fresh flesh.

  Next was a tubular plas tank full of a thin, liquid murk – a sloshing filth of blood-threaded puce. An oxygen pump beat rhythmically on one side of the tank, feeding something inside air through a corroded metal pipe. ‘Xenobi Quordaiyn – the Butcheress of Banzai,’ Santhonax informed Krieg. ‘The end of my predecessor: I promised that I would never be the end of her…’

  The cadet-commissar leaned in to get a better view through the effluence. A single palm thrashed out against the plas causing Krieg to jump back. The hand was skinless and raw: ligaments, veins and in some places bone were all on show. It retracted as fast as it had appeared. ‘Molecular acid,’ Santhonax told him. ‘The weakest I could find. She’ll be slowly dissolved over a thousand years – less than she deserves.’

  The final abomination in the canoness’s personal collection was simply a portrait. A mercury daguerreotype of the kind popular at the Guethenoc Gate: a funereal image of an angelic infant, a newborn, at rest in a tiny wicker coffin. Some kind of mystic Mechanicus apparatus was fixed to the rear of the frame, emanating a headache-inducing hum and causing the antique capture to impossibly flick and shimmer.

  The canoness leaned in close. ‘And him: his name hasn’t been spoken in a millennium and I’ll be damned before I’m the first to let it pass my lips. I’ll spare you a similar curse.’ The nalwood frame creaked ominously. ‘Oh, do be quiet,’ Santhonax spat at the haunting image.

  Krieg waited respectfully before a simple throne at the top of the chamber as the canoness took to her seat. Her strange bodyguard, the young girl with the unsettling eyes, sat on the step at the canoness’s foot, beneath an iron tripod, her tender years at complete odds with the antique armour she wore. Under an equally archaic crusader shield on display in the tripod’s ornate arms the girl played a delicate game of cat’s cradle with the prepubescent fingers of a stone cold killer.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Krieg began, ‘may I ask if you received my report regarding the situation on Illium?’

  The canoness seemed preoccupied with her own thoughts momentarily and stared at the cadet-commissar blankly.

  ‘Your ladyship, the fabricator moon has been completely overrun,’ Krieg informed her, intent on communicating the serious nature of the situation. ‘This is no longer a case of subjugating a rebellion. Orks in those numbers so far in-system, without an invasion fleet: it’s unheard of. And these greenskins behave like no brutes I’ve ever fought: organisation, discipline, strategy. Like I said: the cult killings; the ‘Doomsday Brethren’; Spurrlok’s agricultural freight charters; the rebellion on Illium – all connected. Now, full-scale alien invasion.’

  ‘Calm yourself, cadet,’ Santhonax soothed. ‘Inquisitor Herrenvolk has these intrigues in hand. The 364th Volscian Shadow Brigade can handle the slog work.’

  ‘But ma’am, in my report–’

  ‘I read your report: it was a pleasant work of fiction,’ the canoness suddenly turned on him. Gone was the warmth that had lit up her pin-decorated face whilst perusing her heretical collection. Krieg felt like the sun had just disappeared behind a cloud. ‘All that should concern you are the actions of that heretic major of yours. According to your measured narrative, Major Mortensen ignored your threat assessment of the situation on Illium, he put a blade to an Imperial commissar’s throat and then proceeded to blunder his way through a mission that cost unnecessary lives and Guard resources…’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Krieg admitted, a rush of mixed feelings and confusion flushing his chest.

  ‘The man is clearly a criminal incompetent and you should have administered justice when you had the opportunity,’ Santhonax shrieked. ‘I should have you bathed in acid for your own incompetence.’

  Krieg swallowed hard. This wasn’t one of Kowalski’s tedious remonstrations or Mortensen’s bullish threats: she meant it.

  ‘He then did what you seemed unable to do and made a Guard-orchestrated attempt on your life…’

  ‘I have no evidence that…’

  ‘…and went on to accomplish further deeds of
remarkable courage and endurance, adding further fuel to a dangerous myth and recruiting ever more willing rank and file acolytes to a fallacious hero cult.’

  ‘He was asked to pull assets out of enemy held territory against insurmountable odds and an incalculable, unforeseen alien threat,’ Krieg stated with forced calm. ‘What can I tell you? He got the job done. As yet I have witnessed no actions of direct cowardice, incompetence or cult activity. From a Redemption Corps point of view, the mission was a success.’

  ‘A Redemption Corps point of view?’ the canoness burst incredulously.

  ‘Look, with the right example…’

  ‘Your example, Cadet-Commissar Krieg? It seems your example isn’t particularly trustworthy,’ Santhonax told him, her words a chilled indictment. ‘You’ve just spent the past few moments lending credence to heretical suggestions of this man’s indestructibility.’

  ‘Indestructibility? I can only report what I saw.’

  ‘You were on that aircraft, weren’t you, commissar?’ the battle-sister asked.

  Krieg could see where this was going.

  ‘Mortensen saved your life, didn’t he? How does that make you feel – are you too now beholden to him? Have you become an acolyte?’

  ‘I would eat the barrel of my own pistol if I thought such a suggestion could be entertained,’ the cadet-commissar shot back.

  ‘But you won’t make the major swallow his for his own heresies?’

  ‘Look, I hate the bastard,’ Krieg informed her honestly. ‘When he slips up, I’ll be there waiting for him. I’ll bring him in and you’ll have the justice you crave.’ The leather of the commissar’s gloves creaked as Krieg tensed his fists by his sides. ‘But we do this by the book. Any thug can kill. If we give in to temptation and take avoidable shortcuts then it makes us no better than the scum we’re after.’