[Ultramarines 5] Courage and Honour - Graham McNeill

by Graham McNeill

  'It is of no consequence,' said Aun'rai, and Koudelkar wondered if La'tyen felt the same. Somehow he doubted it.

  He saw a sudden stiffening in the posture of Aun'rai's guards, and turned his chair to see Lortuen Perjed standing in the doorway. Koudelkar's mother stood beside him, and an ashen-faced Jenna Sharben supported herself on a set of metal crutches. Koudelkar felt a rush of unease at the sight of the Chief of Enforcers, suddenly remembering that she was, first and foremost, a judge of the Adeptus Arbites.

  'Adept Perjed,' said Aun'rai smoothly, 'would you care to join us? There is enough tisane to go around. I am told it is quite pleasant to human tastes.'

  'I have nothing to say to you, xenos,' said Perjed.

  'What are you doing here, Lortuen?' demanded Koudelkar. 'I have nothing to say to you.'

  'Then listen,' snapped Sharben, her voice a mix of controlled fury and pain as she awkwardly limped on her crutches into the centre of the room. 'Koudelkar Shonai, by the authority of the Immortal God-Emperor, I hereby relieve you of Imperial command of Pavonis and all its domains. This I do with the full support of this world's senior Administratum adept. From this moment onwards, you pass from the protection of the Imperium, and are numbered amongst its enemies.'

  Koudelkar shrank before Sharben's steely glare, her words like a knife in his guts, until he remembered that he had already forsaken this world for a new life amongst the tau.

  'You think I care about that?' he asked, rising to his feet as a simmering anger swelled within him. 'The Imperium gave up on Pavonis long ago and I welcome your censure. It only proves I have made the right decision.'

  'Oh, Koudelkar,' said his mother, tears running freely down her cheeks. 'What have they done to you to make you say these things?'

  Koudelkar pushed past Sharben and embraced his mother.

  'Don't cry,' he said, 'please. You need to trust me, Mother. I know what I am doing.'

  'No,' she said, 'you don't. They've used some sort of mind control on you or something.'

  'That's absurd,' he said.

  'Please,' she begged, holding him tightly to her. 'You have to come with us. Now.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'You know what she's talking about,' said Perjed, and Koudelkar looked over his mother's shoulder to see a group of Lavrentian soldiers gathering outside. It was impossible to miss the threat of violence they wore, and Koudelkar felt a hot flush of fear as he realised that Adept Perjed's threatened uprising was at hand.

  'It is time to fight,' said Perjed, 'and you had your chance to stand with us.'

  Koudelkar turned to shout a warning to Aun'rai, but before the words could leave his mouth, the noise of an explosion sounded from somewhere nearby. From his position at the door, Koudelkar saw pillars of flame and smoke rising from the towers on either side of the prison gates. A deafening boom sounded an instant later as crackling lightning ripped around the circumference of the camp and fizzing sparks fountained from the pylons of the perimeter force barrier.

  Alarm klaxons sounded, and Koudelkar heard the bark of gunfire. He rounded on Perjed. 'What have you done? You have killed us all!'

  But as the sounds of fighting grew more intense, Koudelkar saw that Adept Perjed was just as surprised.

  TWENTY

  LEARCHUS SHOT A Fire Warrior through the chest, and then ran from the wreckage of the burning guard tower towards a low structure that might have been a power generator. Its sides were cream coloured and marked with a number of tau symbols. Issam covered him with a series of well-aimed bolter shots into a knot of assembling Fire Warriors, and they scattered, leaving two dead in their wake.

  Learchus hammered into the structure, and leaned out to fire into the tau warriors reacting to the sudden invasion of the prison. He put one down with a snap shot and blew the leg off another who was too slow to find cover.

  Daxian fanned out to the other side of the smashed gate as Parmian fired his bolt pistol from behind the second skimmer. The remains of the first skimmer burned just beyond the gateway in the midst of a pile of tau corpses.

  The opening moments of their assault had been more devastating than Learchus could have hoped, and he knew they had to maintain their momentum and keep the tau off-balance. The shock and awe of their sudden assault was forcing the tau to dance to their tune, but as soon as they realised just how few in number were their attackers and fought back…

  Using the scout skimmers to speed through the streets of Praxedes, they had swiftly made their way to the landing jibs, and Learchus had felt his fingers moving across the vehicle's armaments panel of their own volition. He had no idea what he was doing, yet a targeting matrix had projected onto the canopy of the skimmer and seemed to acquire targets one after another. He expected the front-mounted rifles to shoot, and had been disappointed when they stubbornly refused to open fire at their targets. That disappointment had been short-lived as he heard rapid whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sounds from behind, and a series of streaking missiles leapt from a tall sentry turret.

  The missiles impacted on the guard towers on either side of the prison entrance and they exploded in blistering fireballs. Both collapsed into piles of twisted metal, taking out the tau guards and a number of the humming pylons surrounding the camp. Bolts of jade lightning arced between the pylons, and a thunderclap of electrical discharge boomed like an enormous whip-crack.

  The skimmers plunged through the smoke of the destroyed gateway, but the tau were quick to recover from their surprise, and a hail of gunfire shot out of the skimmer carrying Learchus and Daxian. Both warriors leapt from the stricken vehicle as it tumbled end over end and exploded, showering the Fire Warriors who had shot it down with whickering fragments of red-hot metal.

  Issam and Parmian skidded their vehicle to a halt, azure bolts of energy spitting from their skimmer's weapons. Before the prison guards could react, Issam leapt from the pilot's seat, and began firing his bolter as he ran towards cover. Parmian clambered from the vehicle, and took up position behind it, sniping at enemy soldiers from behind the hovering skimmer. 'Issam!' shouted Learchus. 'We need to keep pushing on!'

  'Understood,' replied the scout sergeant. 'Going to be tough though.'

  That was an understatement. The structure Learchus was sheltering behind was rapidly disintegrating under repeated impacts, and, despite Parmian's covering fire, there was no way Learchus could move without being cut down. A firing line of Fire Warriors was systematically destroying his cover, and there was nothing he could do to stop them.

  Then Learchus heard a roaring howl of rage, and the fire pounding his cover slackened. He risked a glance around the structure, and saw something that filled him with exultation. Unarmed prisoners were swarming from their barrack buildings to attack their guards, dragging them down with their sheer weight of numbers and fury. Dozens were dead, for they had no weapons save their fists, but these men were hungry to expunge the stain of their earlier humiliation, and nothing was going to keep them from their vengeance.

  All across the camp, the Imperial prisoners were rising up and attacking their captors. Mobs of imprisoned Guardsmen hurled themselves at the tau, tearing them apart with their bare hands or clubbing them to death with whatever blunt objects came to hand. Others tore the weapons from the dead Fire Warriors and turned them on their captors with savage glee.

  Learchus had seldom seen a more inspiring sight, and, though he wanted to punch the air in triumph, the very gaucheness of the gesture restrained him. He spun from cover, and surged forwards into the melee, seeing Issam break from cover at the same instant.

  Daxian moved out to join his sergeant, and the three Space Marines were a wedge of fighting fury that plunged deep into the tau. Learchus felt a savage sense of release as he shot another Fire Warrior in the chest. After so long avoiding contact with the enemy, to release the controlled aggression of the Astartes in close-quarters battle was as cathartic as it was exhilarating.

  He turned to wave Parmian forwards with them, to
join in the slaughter, but the joy of battle drained from him as he saw that the tau forces beyond the camp were finally reacting to the enemy in their midst.

  At least two-dozen battlesuits were jetting through the air towards the prison, closely followed by three Hammerheads, moving swiftly towards the burning gateway. Learchus's assault was pushing deep into the camp, and the inmates were rising up, but a rabble of prisoners with a handful of rifles and four Space Marines could not hope to face such a force and live.

  Seeing the tau reaction force, Parmian tried to find cover, but he was spotted by the lead battlesuit team and had nowhere to run. The first battlesuit landed just behind Parmian and unleashed a searing blast of fiery plasma at point-blank range. The wounded scout had no time to scream as he was instantly incinerated, leaving nothing but the blackened shreds of a corpse.

  Learchus and his fellow warriors ducked into the cover of one of the barrack buildings. A flurry of shells shredded the ground where they had been standing.

  'COME ON, URIEL,' he hissed. 'Where are you?'

  At the sound of the first explosion, Jenna Sharben leapt into action. Her burst of movement caught Koudelkar's eye, and he watched in horror as she spun her crutch around and stabbed it into the belly of one of Aun'rai's bodyguards. Only then did he notice that the bottom of each crutch had been sharpened to a lethal point.

  The Fire Warrior screamed foully and collapsed, blood pouring down his legs from the terrible wound. Clearly the chief of enforcers was not as debilitated by her wounds as she had led the tau to believe.

  Sharben swung her other crutch around in a short, brutal arc, the heavy end hammering into another bodyguard's helmet with a solid crunch. The warrior went down heavily as Sharben turned to face the last of Aun'rai's protectors.

  Koudelkar made to go to Aun'rai's aid, but his mother gripped his tunic tightly. Her eyes pleaded with him not to go, but, for better or worse, Koudelkar had made his choice, and he had to live up to his end of the bargain.

  He threw off her grip, though it broke his heart to hear her despairing cry.

  'Koudelkar, no!' shouted Perjed. 'Don't.'

  Though Sharben had fooled them with her display of weakness, the element of surprise could only see her so far, and La'tyen leapt on her with an anguished cry of hatred. Arbites Judge and Fire Warrior rolled on the ground, punching and clawing at one another.

  The chief enforcer's elbow slammed into La'tyen's midriff, but the Fire Warrior's flexible body armour bore the brunt of the blow. La'tyen hooked her arm around Sharben's throat and dug her fingers into her neck. Sharben slammed her head backwards into La'tyen's face, and Koudelkar heard the crack of a cheekbone breaking. Sharben rolled from her opponent with a grunt of pain, scrabbling for a weapon as La'tyen drew a glittering knife from her belt.

  Koudelkar had heard that they were called honour blades, and were ceremonial weapons used to symbolise fraternity amongst the tau, though there was nothing ceremonial about its viciously sharp edge.

  The blade slashed towards Sharben, who leapt back to avoid being gutted. She cried out in pain as her weight came down on her injured leg. The Arbites Judge was not as badly hurt as she had made out, but she was still hurt.

  Koudelkar wanted to intervene, but knew La'tyen would as likely gut him as Sharben. The bleeding Fire Warrior continued to cry out in pain as his blood spilled from his wound, but his dazed compatriot was rising unsteadily to his feet with a rifle held before him.

  La'tyen feinted with her honour blade, and Sharben fell to one knee as her wounded leg gave out beneath her. It was the opening that La'tyen needed, and she plunged the blade of her knife into Sharben's chest.

  The combatants crashed to the floor, and La'tyen stabbed the mortally wounded enforcer again and again in a frenzy of grief, anger and hatred. Blood spurted, and sprayed the walls in spattering arcs as La'tyen let the horror of her torture in the Glasshouse pour from her in a frenzy of savage violence.

  Koudelkar recoiled from the awfulness of Sharben's death, horrified at the animal savagery of the killing. La'tyen looked up, and through the mask of blood coating her twisted features, Koudelkar saw the true nature of the tau race, the darkness they kept hidden behind their veneer of civilisation and fantastical notions of the Greater Good.

  Lortuen Perjed ran forwards as Sharben died, desperation lending his aged limbs strength. He bent to retrieve the short-barrelled weapon dropped by the Fire Warrior Sharben had first attacked, and fumbled with the firing mechanism.

  'Don't be an idiot, Lortuen! Put the gun down!' shouted Koudelkar, having no wish to see Lortuen killed in this terrible folly. The adept was not to be dissuaded from his course, however, and he and the dazed Fire Warrior pulled the triggers in the same moment. Koudelkar flinched as volleys of searing blue energy beams sprayed the room.

  The Fire Warrior went down in a crumpled heap, his chest a cratered ruin, but he had taken his killer with him. Lortuen Perjed was punched from his feet, his fragile body torn virtually in two by the flurry of high energy bolts.

  As terrible as was Lortuen's fate, the true horror was behind the murdered adept.

  Koudelkar's mother slid down the pristine walls of his quarters, leaving a bloody smear behind her. Pawluk Shonai's eyes were wide with pain, and her prison-issue tunic was soaked with an expanding red stain.

  'No!' cried Koudelkar, running over to his mother. He gathered her up in his arms as tears blurred his vision. He put his hand on her stomach, trying in vain to stem the flow of blood from her body.

  'Emperor save her, please, oh please no!' wailed Koudelkar, desperately pleading with the only god he knew to save his mother. 'Oh God-Emperor, no, don't let this happen!'

  Koudelkar watched the life drain from his mother's eyes, and gave a terrible, aching cry of loss. His eyes filled with tears, and he sobbed as he held her lifeless body tight.

  'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' he wept. 'It's all my fault. I betrayed you, oh Emperor forgive me, please forgive me…'

  Koudelkar felt a presence near him, and looked up from his grief to see Aun'rai standing over him, his expression one of profound disappointment.

  'You call to your Emperor for aid?' asked Aun'rai. 'After all we have discussed, you still turn to your distant Emperor for solace? No matter what your intellect might say, you look to gods and spirits in times of trouble. How pathetically human of you.'

  'She's dead!' wailed Koudelkar. 'Don't you understand? She's dead.'

  'I understand all too well,' said Aun'rai coldly, as La'tyen appeared at his side, her face and armour drenched in Sharben's blood.

  Koudelkar fought to cling onto his sanity in the face of this horrific bloodshed. In a matter of seconds, his bright future of importance and luxury had turned to horror and grief. He shook his head, and gently laid his mother down on the cold, hard floor of his quarters.

  He stood and faced the two tau. One desperately wanted to kill him, the other to enslave him, and Koudelkar wasn't sure which fate he dreaded more.

  'It does not have to end here,' said Aun'rai. 'You can still be part of the Greater Good.'

  'I think not,' replied Koudelkar, backing out of the doorway, through which the crack of gunfire and the boom of explosions could be heard. 'I want nothing from you or your race. If I am to die, then I will die among my own kind.'

  Koudelkar turned and walked down the steps to the landing platform. He could taste the smoke in the air and the crackling electric charge of the downed security fences. Shouting soldiers and the bark of weapons' fire surrounded him, but Koudelkar had never felt more at ease with himself.

  He remembered a conversation he'd had with Lortuen Perjed not long after they had arrived at the prison camp.

  'We are prisoners of war,' Koudelkar had said. 'What honour do we have?'

  'Only what we bring with us,' was Perjed's reply, and only now did Koudelkar understand what the adept had meant. He lifted his head and looked into the achingly blue sky, taking a deep breath of the ocean-scented air.

/>   Koudelkar frowned, and raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun as he saw a number of falling objects that looked out of place in the heavens. He smiled as he recognised them for what they were.

  Aun'rai appeared in the doorway of his quarters, seemingly unconcerned with the fighting that raged through the prison complex.

  'This foolish uprising will be quashed,' spat the tau. 'And nothing will have changed.'

  'You know, I think you're wrong about that,' said Koudelkar, pointing towards the sky where a host of Space Marine drop-pods streaked towards the ground on blazing lines of fire.

  URIEL'S DROP-POD HAMMERED down in a blazing flare of rockets and pulverised metal decking. Explosive bolts blew out the heat-shielded doors, and the locking harnesses securing the Space Marines within snapped upright. What had been a hermetically sealed environment for travel through the cold of space and the heat of re-entry was now open to the elements and the reek of propellant and scorched metal filled the air.

  'Go! Everyone out!' shouted Uriel, and the warriors who had endured the thunderous ride from the embarkation deck of the Vae Victus with him leapt instantly to obey. Uriel led them from the drop-pod, taking in the ebb and flow of the battle in a moment.

  Learchus had done his work well.

  The Praxedes detention camp was in uproar, with desperate Fire Warriors in combat with hordes of equally desperate prisoners. The fighting was ferocious, but it was clear that the tau had the upper hand. Though considerably outnumbered by their captives, the Fire Warriors were highly-trained and had no give in them.

  Numbers and courage could carry any assault far, but against disciplined soldiers armed with powerful weapons, it was never going to be enough, and the Lavrentian prisoners were being slaughtered. Uriel saw Learchus and two scouts firing on a battlesuit squad from the cover of a barrack building. While the weight of fire kept Learchus pinned in place, two other battlesuits were moving to encircle him.

  Chaplain Clausel's voice sounded in his helmet. 'Our arrival is most timely.'