Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

by Warhammer 40K

  The major enjoyed her momentary uncertainty.

  Santhonax clicked her fingers, bringing her battle-sisters out of the cell shadows, and tuned her vox into an alternative channel. ‘We’re leaving,’ she simply notified the person on the other end. The pressure door in the ceiling gave a hydraulic wheeze and squirted gas from nozzles situated around the bulkhead rim. The trapdoor opened upwards and a robust wire ladder fell, unravelling itself to the floor.

  The two sisters hauled Mortensen’s body out of the chair, putting each arm across their sinewy shoulders and toned necks. The canoness put the sole of one boot on the first wire step. The sisters approached with Mortensen supported between them.

  ‘When we get back to the ship, you can ask the other specimens in my personal collection: you die when I say you die,’ Santhonax told the major evenly.

  Mortensen gave her a conceited smile. ‘Life’s a bitch. Mind you, I’m told it takes one to know one.’

  Chapter Seven

  Cradle of Darkness

  I

  ‘Mighty good to see you, sir,’ Golliant rasped, his boot steps echoing around the deck elevator as he helped a tender Commissar Krieg into a fresh greatcoat. Krieg didn’t hide his relief and slapped the aide on the shoulder.

  ‘It’s good to be back onboard,’ he told the hulking Volscian. It also felt good to have the wrestler by his side after events down on the deathworld moon.

  As the elevator doors parted, the major stepped confidently out onto the bridge. Krieg followed with more caution, realising that this was actually the first time that he’d been up there. Golliant hovered steadfastly by the elevator doors as the cadet limped across the deck.

  The bridge was quiet and bathed in a harsh cerulean glow. Mortensen silently joined the silhouettes of the bandaged Rask and Sass as they stood before the great screen, below the captain’s pulpit. Lieutenant Commander Waldemar climbed out of his throne and stood gripping the balustrade rail. He caught the cadet-commissar’s eye as he entered, but Krieg’s line of sight was swiftly drawn to what everyone else was gazing at on the screen.

  Before him blazed the cold sheen of the Spetzghastian mesosphere, but something was impossibly wrong. The mercantile giant’s spectacular ring system was in complete disarray. Instead of a neat dust belt of spinning rock and ice fragments, chaperoned by shepherd moons like the verdant Tancred’s World and the pockmarked Wormwood, the girdle was fragmented: irregular asteroids were peeling off in different directions, many falling planetward with building velocity. Ishtar was fairly far out for one of the Spetzghastian moons and they could see everything. It was as though gravity had simply failed and the ring system was breaking up.

  Krieg stepped forward, rubbing his tired eyes with forefinger and thumb, making sure that he wasn’t hallucinating. A closer inspection revealed the reason for the unusual phenomenon: titanic engines and bulbous propellant tanks grew out of the natural rock of the jagged asteroids. Primitive boosters spun the gargantuan bodies on their axis before the main stage engines rocketed them towards the planet surface, Spetzghast’s potent gravitational pull doing the rest.

  The bridge was shell-shocked; Krieg had never seen such a spectacle. An apocalyptic blitz of ready-made planet-smashers, plunging towards the heavily populated mercantile world, like thunderbolts from an angry god. Both the workmanship and tactics were greenskin by design: headlong suicide runs of crushing effectiveness. The system had clearly been infiltrated for a long time and the asteroids mined out and modified to create an armada of kamikaze roks and bouldered hulks. It was clear to everyone on the bridge that Spetzghast would be pounded to dust.

  As they tumbled sickeningly towards the planet, the ork roks rolled to present previously hidden batteries of superguns and cannons, laying effortless waste to the anchored fluyts and bulk cruisers in high orbit. Swarms of luggers and freight barges impacted on the rocky surface, their pathetic detonations giving the impression of sparks and ricochets. A sleek sprint trader broke orbit, crashing through several sister vessels before soaring narrowly between the two converging behemoths. A rogue trader freighter attempted the same manoeuvre, only to end up a blazing wreck, tangled across the rockface.

  Krieg watched as adamanticlads and monitors bore down bravely on a jagged giant as it flipped and spun wildly through the spindly appendage docks of the Exchequer orbital tradestation. The rok left a field of spinning debris in its wake, sending a ripple of explosions up through the crippled station. The system ships were soon joined by one of the convoy escorts, the frigate Orpheus. Pooling their firepower, the Firestorm-class frigate met the ork craft head on, cutting deep into the rock with its raging prow lance. Incredibly one of the heavily-armed monitors made an impression on the rok’s swollen engine column, a lucky shot setting off a chain reaction that blasted the greenskin vessel unexpectedly to starboard. The rok’s craggy surface lightly brushed along the side of the Orpheus, tearing up the frigate’s armour and exposing thousands of Navy crewmen to the searing cold of space.

  The ancient and impressive garrison ship Stang Draak was smashed free in the ensuing chaos and perfectly placed to rake the length of the rok with its obsolete guns. The grand cruiser’s much younger crew had only ever fired the weapons on exercise or to salute the arrival of dignitaries and touring port admirals. Their response was slow and sloppy, many of the shots wide and misranged, which was incredible bearing in mind the size of the target.

  A jolt of shock and disbelief swept the bridge as the grand cruiser died before their eyes. Something beautiful was there one moment and then suddenly wasn’t, replaced by a breathtaking display of power and destruction, which seconds later also vanished.

  A promontory prow thrust forth, out of the nothing where the garrison ship had been. Behind it, incalculable tons of extraterrestrial rock and scavwelded salvage thundered through the silence of space. The space hulk was like a mountain range, imposing and impossible: an unstoppable monster, smashing roks and Imperial vessels aside with equal, crushing indifference. A grotesque flagship hewn from pure hate.

  The Vatividad, the Algonquin Royale, the Morningstar, the Countess of Scarbra… The fat troopships careered and coursed full thrust for safety, but the behemoth overreached them, drawing parallel with its magna-bore artillery, consuming all in a growing bank of flame and fury. Krieg stared on in disbelief as the lives aboard the transports were snuffed out like a row of candles in a sudden breeze. The commissar felt sick to the bottom of his stomach. Sicker, if that were possible.

  His heart lifted for a moment, no doubt foolish pride in the futile gestures of his compatriots. The hulk’s underside was suddenly bathed in flashes as a stream of torpedoes found their mark. The successive glare of the hits faded, however, to reveal the greenskin ship unscathed. The Purgatorio surged up, its baroque beakhead breaking free of the black depths like some rising leviathan. The Dictator-class blasted uselessly at the impervious giant, the passing salvo a disciplined and worthy pattern of fire for the flagship. The space hulk rocketed on through the barrage and slammed into the vessel’s mid-section.

  Krieg’s fists tightened and his knuckles cracked. Like a tug tearing an uncooperative giga-tanker round in a system dock, the broken flagship tried to roll the hulk planetward. The cruiser’s towers and flank arrays tangled with the hulk’s own irregular structures, grappling with the beast and forcing it into a slight turn. The Purgatorio’s dorsal finally snared the cosmic predator, a dying push from the plasma drives doing the rest. Like a featherweight throwing a much heavier opponent in a scud wrestling ring the Dictator played to what centre of gravity it had left and sent both the hulk and itself spinning towards the upper atmosphere of the besieged mercantile world.

  It was Mortensen that broke the solemn silence that blanketed the bridge and paralysed all those who were witness to the murder of a world.

  ‘How could we have not known… about this?’ he managed.

 
Waldemar, his patrician accent a little softer and less grating than usual, told him, ‘Communication black-out. We lost all feeds. I assumed it was a technical problem and had my engineers run the appropriate diagnostics and litanies.’

  ‘What about astropathic lines of communication?’ Rask offered. ‘Surely Spetzghast or the other ships–’

  ‘Total black-out,’ the austere Waldemar assured him. ‘My psykers received nothing and nothing they sent got through.’

  ‘How is that possible?’ the major asked grimly.

  ‘The teleporters,’ Krieg threw in. It was more of a flat statement than the victorious solution to a problem.

  ‘That kind of greenskin technology would play havoc with our comms,’ Sass confirmed.

  ‘Especially if it was being engaged across many points in the ring system,’ the commissar added. ‘We have every reason to believe that the system is completely compromised. A large number of troops would have to be moved to prepare for as bold an advance as this.’

  The major’s adjutant shook his head – unhappy with the conclusion: ‘The astropaths would still be able to get through.’

  Krieg gave them the benefit of his Inquisitorial training. ‘The greenskins generate a collective psychic field in such circumstances. Perhaps that was enough to block astropathic communication. Psychic static, if you will.’

  ‘It’s never been enough to disrupt communications before,’ Waldemar informed him, unconvinced.

  Mortensen nodded slowly: ‘He’s right,’ the major growled. ‘I’ve fought this scum on dozens of worlds and it’s the first time I’ve come across that.’

  Krieg juggled the concepts crackling inside his head. He thought of the rebels on Illium, the formerly loyalist abhuman populations of Ishtar and the cultists he’d hunted on Spetzghast. How the Sisters of the Immaculate Flame had failed to find a psyker among them, only a psychic blankness that seemed to link them all.

  ‘Then it’s something else,’ Krieg insisted. He couldn’t formulate a web of relationships that linked all the elements and explained all the factors. All he kept coming up with was half-digested hunches and ghostly, paranoid suggestions.

  Mortensen turned back to the battle, feasting his eyes on the annihilation. An idea was eating away at his soul and he finally found the words to express its brutal simplicity.

  ‘How long to get us on the planet’s surface?’

  Waldmar called his amazement across the bridge: ‘You can’t be serious?’

  ‘I’m always serious,’ Mortensen updated the officer, turning away from the screen, catching Rask’s unsettled expression as he did. ‘Except when I’m not.’

  ‘It’s over,’ the lieutenant commander told him. ‘What do you think you can do: save the planet?’

  ‘No,’ Mortensen said, clearly lost in thoughts of his own home world’s demise. ‘I can’t do that. But we can pull the flagship crash survivors offworld before those ork roks pulverise it. I can’t stand those mungers: on any other day Brigadier Voskov and his tight-ass Shadow Brigade commanders can go to hell. Today, a greenskin battlefront is opening up right on top of us and we’re going to need some of that Volscian methodology to formulate a response to this mess. It could be months before a tactical command structure is back in place otherwise, and think how far these greenskins could have rushed us by then.’

  Waldemar was no coward, but he looked like one as his eyes moved from the major’s stony glare to the destruction beyond and then around the bridge at his own officers. His eyes lingered for a moment on Krieg. It was common knowledge that he and the major were at each other’s throats. Krieg returned his gaze. At heart Waldemar was a sound and inventive officer and had one final play to make before committing to a potentially disastrous course of action, one way or the other.

  ‘Major, I think that you are overestimating the capabilities of this ship. Deliverance is a small carrier. She won’t last ten seconds against that kind of firepower. You would have me risk every soul aboard, including every single one of your storm-troopers, in one foolishly bold and futile manoeuvre?’

  Krieg watched the major mull it over.

  ‘As one of the only combat operative vessels in the system,’ the captain continued, ‘isn’t it protocol to make for Aurelius and warn other nearby systems, so that they might prepare for the eventuality of war?’

  Mortensen glared around the silent bridge.

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you? Redemption Corps don’t run. Aurelius? Warning the fleet? Leave that to some freighter,’ Mortensen spat. ‘This is a military vessel: I say we stay and we do what we can. And what we can do right now is get my men and the remaining 364th into any and every available sub-atmospheric craft you have, and get them down on the surface so they can do their job.’

  Waldemar’s eyes narrowed and the coin-shaped scar on his cheek flared. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do that.’

  ‘You think you can stop us?’ the major seared. Both corpsmen and naval security tensed, their side arms but the flick of a wrist away.

  The commander’s own trembling hand went down to his Patrician hanger: ‘Try it, you mutinous dog…’

  Krieg’s hellpistol was already clear of its fresh holster. A burst of super-charged las-fire drummed into the deck, bringing the attention of all squarely to his feet. Both Waldemar, proud and uncertain, and the major, feral and fearsome, turned at the sound of automatic fire on the bridge. Only a newly-promoted security ensign in a spanking uniform and creaking, new boots was foolish enough to point his weapon at the Imperial commissar.

  ‘Think that prudent do you, boy?’ Krieg put to the ensign, without looking at him. The young officer stared at Krieg and then his pistol before slowly drifting the muzzle to the floor. The ensign suddenly became aware of a presence, turning to find the hulking Golliant immediately behind him. Wide-eyed, the ensign dropped the pistol on the deck and turned, backing to the cognition banks adorning the wall.

  Krieg took in the bridge with one sweeping glance. Waldemar wasn’t wrong. They were seconds from actual mutiny: storm-troopers exchanging fire with Navy grunts on the bridge of one of his Beneficient Majesty’s hallowed warships. There was only one authority on the ship that superseded both the lieutenant commander and the Redemption Corps major and it sat snug on his finger. He presented the ring and his fist to both men, letting the hypnotic power of the winged-skull signet take effect.

  With Regimental Commissar Udeskee below decks and out of reach and the ship’s commissar, a firebreather called Locke – well, dead – Krieg was the only one who could legitimately act in this situation.

  ‘Back to this, huh?’ Mortensen shot sardonically across the bridge. It was a dare. As it was, on this particular occasion, Krieg didn’t actually disagree with the major.

  ‘Captain Waldemar, can you actually get through that?’ the cadet-commissar asked, nodding his cap at the screen. ‘Can you get us to Spetzghast?’

  ‘This is madness,’ the captain settled upon. ‘And I should have you all thrown in the damned brig.’

  ‘Can you do it, captain?’ Krieg insisted.

  The officer bridled, professional pride prevailing.

  ‘Yes,’ was the simple answer. ‘But Commissar Krieg, that is not–’

  ‘Oh, but unfortunately it is,’ Krieg cut in with regret. ‘At present velocity, I’d say we have three or four hours, at most, to get on and off the surface before those roks hit.’

  ‘Three hours, forty-two minutes to first impact,’ Sass interjected, soaking up data from the bridge picts and rune screens like a sponge.

  ‘If we’re not knee deep in Spetzghastian sand within two, captain, I’ll have you escorted to the brig for cowardice, dereliction of duty and negligent conduct. I’m sure the ship’s commissar would agree if he had the misfortune of still being with us.’

  ‘You imperious cub,’ Waldemar snapped back, ‘You can’t�
��’

  ‘I speak for Udeskee; I speak for the Commissariat; I speak for the Emperor, in this matter,’ Krieg told him with searing certainty.

  A stunned bridge continued to hold a bated breath.

  ‘And if I refuse?’ Waldemar asked, his scar burning bright.

  ‘Your actions will be judged by your superiors in light of your witnessed refusal to save Imperial lives, your refusal to at least attempt a rescue of Commodore van den Groot and the Volscian High Command and your seeming preference for conduct unbecoming an officer of one of his beneficient majesty’s warships.’

  Waldemar went to retort but Krieg hadn’t finished.

  ‘But that’s irrelevant because long before that, Captain Waldemar, I’ll have you shot,’ the commissar informed him plainly, ‘and empower Major Mortensen’s men to take command of this vessel, by force if necessary. And we are all too ready to face the Emperor’s judgement in that. Believe me, captain, we are martyrs all. There’s a reason we’re called Redemption Corps.’ The commissar let his words sink in, and since it seemed that he had overplayed his hand regardless, added: ‘Who is the executive officer of this crate, anyhow?’

  A lieutenant with a shiny head and thoughtful brown eyes stepped forward hesitantly.

  ‘Name?’ Krieg requested. The first lieutenant went to speak, getting as far as opening his lips, but the voice that came across the bridge was not his.

  ‘Mister Caviezel,’ Waldemar supplied. ‘Be so good as to plot an evasion course through the Quirini Division. Calculate the location of the Purgatorio’s crash site and establish a low entry orbit around Spetzghast. Best possible speed: there’s a good fellow.’

  Krieg nodded and reholstered his hellpistol. Walking for the elevator he was joined by Mortensen and his men at the doors. Golliant was already holding them open with his brawny arms, allowing the commissar and the storm-troopers to walk in underneath. As the doors closed and the car began its descent, an awkward silence prevailed.