by C Z Dunn
The governor turned to face Ladbon.
‘That’s how I got these.’ He pointed to his medals. ‘That’s how I got that.’ He pointed to his left eye. ‘And that’s how I got this.’ He spread his arms wide, indicating his office.
Ladbon wasn’t sure what to say. ‘I hope that one day I too can become a great hero like you, lord. But please tell me, am I in some kind of trouble?’
‘Do you love Marita, captain?’ the governor said.
Ladbon was taken aback. ‘I…’
‘Do you love my daughter, captain?’
Ladbon was sweating from head to foot. ‘I didn’t…’ He composed himself and looked the governor square in the eye. ‘Yes. With all my heart.’
‘And what about the child she is carrying? Will you love that with all your heart too?’
Ladbon was momentarily speechless. ‘She’s pregnant?’ he said eventually, his face splitting into a wide grin.
The governor’s features and tone relaxed. ‘So you plan to stand by her then?’
‘Absolutely,’ Ladbon said without hesitation. ‘Is she here? May I see her?’
Ladbon wasn’t sure what he wanted to say to Marita. They had been together almost since the day he had set foot on Honoria, the shy, pretty redhead assigned as an interpreter between the incoming Vostroyans and the local forces, instantly winning his affections. In all those months, she had never once mentioned that her father was the governor, which made Ladbon somewhat bitter – why didn’t she feel she could share that with him? But that could wait. Most of all Ladbon just wanted to wrap his arms around her and let her know that he was there for her, that everything was going to work out for them.
‘I don’t think that’s wise under the circumstances,’ the governor said.
‘You can’t keep me from her!’ Ladbon said, suddenly exploding with emotion. ‘I demand–’
‘You are in no position to demand anything, Captain Antilov,’ the governor said, meeting Ladbon’s rage with assertive calm. ‘It is only thanks to my intervention that the commissars haven’t put a bolt-round through your skull.’
Engaging in, as the Imperial Infantryman’s Primer put it, ‘amorous congress’ with civilians while on active duty was an infraction – like so many others in the Astra Miltarum – punishable by execution. Even Ladbon’s rank would not spare him from the wrath of the Commissariat.
‘I don’t understand,’ Ladbon said. ‘Why spare me from their guns? Surely you must be angry with me?’
‘I am positively choleric with rage, captain. A veritable volcano of anger waiting to erupt. It is taking all of my self-control not to tear that oversized augmetic from your face and beat you to death with it.’ The governor’s tone remained level.
‘So why–’
‘Because it is quite clear that my daughter loves you, and you love her. She hasn’t been close to anybody since her mother died and my role as governor leaves me precious little time to spend with her. I have already lost one woman that I love, and I fear that if I were to endorse your execution, or even fail to prevent it, I would lose another.’
Marita hadn’t spoken much about her mother to Ladbon. He knew that they had been very close, even during Marita’s teenage years, but other than that all he knew was that she’d died on the voyage that brought Marita to Honoria.
‘If you know I love her, then you must understand how important it is that I see her,’ Ladbon pleaded.
‘Can’t you see that I’m doing this for your own good?’ said the governor, raising his voice. ‘For the good of both of you? I am governor of this world but I have no sway over the Commissariat. If they find out about you and Marita then it is beyond my powers to prevent them carrying out the sentence. My daughter is quite safe and will remain so until after her child is born, but you will not have any contact with her until then. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly,’ Ladbon said through gritted teeth.
‘War is coming. Already the greenskins are at our threshold and the next few weeks are going to be bloody and costly, but we will prevail. The Imperium will be triumphant, though not without great sacrifice. If, in the confusion of battle, Captain Ladbon Antilov should go missing, presumed dead, left behind when his regiment returns to the stars, then that wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen, would it?’
‘You’ve read my record. I love Marita more than life itself, but my duty is to my men. You know I’d never abandon them, especially on the eve of battle.’
‘A father’s love for his daughter runs deep, captain,’ the governor said, looking out through the window again. ‘I’ve pulled a few strings, called in some favours with Vostroyan brass. I’ve had you transferred here to the gubernatorial fortress as a liaison. For the duration of the war, you’ll be staying right here as my guest.’
‘You’re locking me up, aren’t you?’ Ladbon said, not needing his powers of foresight to come to that conclusion.
‘How did you two get in here?’ Ladbon said, getting up from the wooden stool in the corner of his cell. The stone stairs down into the cell block were cast in darkness, giving Ladbon no discernible way of identifying his visitors.
‘How did you know it was us?’ said Allix, stepping into the weak shaft of light cast by the sole, tiny window high above Ladbon’s cell. Dmitri followed, his alabaster skin lending him a ghostly aspect in the gloom.
‘I could smell you,’ Ladbon lied. His foresight had kicked in just before he heard the cell block door creak open. ‘Neither of you have showered since we deployed here.’
‘That’s a damn lie, captain,’ Allix said, grinning. ‘I had one two weeks ago to get the ork blood out of my hair.’
‘What are you even doing here? How did you get in?’ Ladbon said, gripping the plasteel bars of his cell.
‘Remember those Honorians we saved from that pair of greenskins a while back?’ Dmitri said.
‘I remember. Kas decapitated one with the heavy bolter, Grigori led the other into a minefield.’
‘That’s right. Well, they’ve rotated onto guarding the governor’s fortress. We figured they owed us their lives and convinced them to look the other way while we paid our captain a visit,’ said Dmitri.
‘While I appreciate the gesture, you didn’t need to go AWOL on my account,’ Ladbon sighed.
‘We didn’t,’ Allix laughed. ‘Right after the commissar hauled you off, the order came down the line that we were to abandon the northern territories and pull back to reinforce the capital. We’re billeted at one of the gates on the eastern side of the city. Took us less than an hour to get here on foot and, unless you’ve got a really long and complicated explanation as to why you’re locked up in here, we’ll be back in our bivvy bags before first light.’
‘Marita is pregnant,’ Ladbon said.
There was an awkward silence. ‘Erm… congratulations?’ Allix said.
‘And her father is the governor.’
‘Wow. For somebody who has been so good at avoiding trouble up until now, you really have sunk deep into the brown stuff,’ said Dmitri. ‘What are you going to do for an encore? Climb naked up a statue of a primarch and proclaim yourself the new God-Emperor?’
‘So why are you rotting in here instead of swinging from a yardarm?’ Allix asked. ‘Amorous congress and all that crap.’
‘That thing I just told you about her father being the governor? He’s keen that I stick around and take care of Marita and the baby once it’s born.’
‘You’re the best man I know,’ Allix said. ‘A better man than me, at least. You would never abandon your child.’
‘I think he knows that, but he also knows that I wouldn’t abandon my squad. He’s ex-Militarum himself and knows all too well the risks. Thinks I’m likely to get killed in the forthcoming war so he’s making me sit it out down here for the duration.’
‘Good job
the cavalry’s here to bust you out then,’ Dmitri said, pulling out an enormous pair of bolt croppers from his backpack.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Ladbon said, to Dmitri’s obvious dismay. ‘If I escape then we will have to go AWOL and any chance I have of being with Marita disappears forever. As much as I hate it, I’m going to have to stay put.’
Allix swore in Vostroyan. ‘But we need you, secondborn. Who else is going to keep us out of trouble?’
‘I think my second in command is going to take care of that perfectly well.’ Allix blushed at the compliment. ‘There is something you need to do for me though, one last order before I cede command.’
‘Name it,’ Allix said.
‘I need you to find Marita.’
Chapter Five
The flight deck of the Sword of Caliban reverberated with the noise of battle preparation as serfs fitted power armour to their Dark Angels masters, and the brothers of the Fifth Company anointed and prepared their weapons.
The command squad went among them, proffering advice, encouragement and leadership. Puriel regaled Ninth and Tenth Squads – several of whom were newly elevated from the Scout Company – with parables and litanies of how the sons of the Lion had battled the greenskins in millennia past, extolling them to acts of greater glory in the war to come. Rephial sought out Fourth Squad, all of whom bore scars and injuries from the campaign against the tau, and checked them over as their armour was lifted onto their bodies, looking for anything he might have missed when he had declared them fit for action. Serpicus moved from squad to squad, giving final blessings to the arms carried by the brothers of the Fifth Company but paying special attention to the Dark Angels’ signature plasma weapons, which were prone to overheating and even exploding. Zadakiel did similarly, steeling his warriors’ resolve and issuing final orders before they boarded the waiting Thunderhawks.
Ezekiel, constantly shadowed by Turmiel, chose to spend the final minutes before exiting the warp with Balthasar’s squad. Though anybody who travelled through the immaterium could feel the change as the translation back into real space occurred, the shifting of the soul was felt more keenly by the psychically attuned.
Ezekiel had read extensively from the journals and writings of previous brothers of the Dark Angels Librarius, and many had shared their experiences and feelings of being a psyker adrift in the warp. One Librarian in particular, the long-lived Gradiel, who had served during the 36th millennium and was one of Ezekiel’s favourite writers, had compared warp travel to being in the womb – nurturing and familiar – and the return to real space akin to birth – sudden and traumatic. Right now, Ezekiel was doing what he could to take his mind off what was to come.
‘Impressive, sergeant,’ Ezekiel said. ‘We have yet to exit the warp and are more than an hour from insertion, yet your squad is already fully armoured and prepared to deploy.’
In the hours since they had convened in the strategium, Company Master Zadakiel had finessed the battle plan he had discussed with the command squad. Rather than rushing blindly down onto the planet’s surface, they would allow time for the Sword of Caliban’s sensors to sweep the surface and ascertain where the best insertion point, or points, were. Then, in anticipation of heavy anti-aircraft fire from the entrenched orks, they would make planetfall in the more manoeuvrable Thunderhawks, rather than drop pods.
His thinking was sound and also flexible; if the forces of the Imperium on Honoria had already succumbed to the ork onslaught then it would simply be a matter of virus bombing the planet from orbit rather than engaging in a protracted and pointless ground war. The terms of the Pact of Kulgotha only bound the Dark Angels to come to the aid of the Mechanicus, not do their job for them. Whatever technology they hungered for could spend the next ten thousand years under a shroud of pestilence and disease.
‘First Squad sets the standard that all of Fifth Company must aspire to, Epistolary,’ Balthasar said. Despite the sergeant’s naked hatred of psykers, Ezekiel was warming to Balthasar. His devotion to not only the Dark Angels, but also excellence in battle, was unswerving.
‘Were it not for an accident of birth, of being raised upon a world under the sworn protection of the Dark Angels, you might have made a fine Ultramarine, brother,’ Ezekiel said. Balthasar had spent his years prior to ascending to the ranks of the Dark Angels on one of the thousands of worlds that the Chapter was oathed to protect and, in return, recruited from. The sergeant’s home world had laboured under the predations of a psychic cult, one that he himself had helped bring down as a boy soldier in a resistance movement, which was the source of his distrust and borderline hostility towards the warp-touched.
‘And if it weren’t for an accident of birth, you might wear green power armour instead of blue, Brother Ezekiel,’ Balthasar said. It was a statement of fact, no malice in his voice.
‘I do not grasp the point you are trying to make, sergeant,’ Ezekiel replied.
‘We have both undergone the same transformation, you and I. We have the same implants and have undergone the same procedures that have turned us into Space Marines. If an ork or any other xenos filth was to be placed in front of us, either of us would be more than capable of defeating it in combat, even without our armour or our boltguns or our combat blades.’
‘I still don’t see your meaning.’
‘But what if that ork or eldar or tau was on the other side of the flight deck?’ Balthasar gestured to the far side of the vast space the Fifth Company had assembled in, towards enormous doors several metres thick, closed to protect those within from the perils without while in warp transit. ‘Without a weapon in my hand, I would be powerless. But you? You could compel it to turn its own gun upon itself, surround it in a cocoon and starve it of oxygen, or kill it in countless other ways.’
For a moment, Ezekiel considered that Balthasar was actually jealous, that the accident of birth was him being deprived of psychic abilities.
‘But what if you weren’t warp-touched? What if you were deprived of your psychic gifts? Would we still be equals? Would you even be wearing power armour of any colour?’
There was the crux of it. Balthasar believed that it was Librarians’ powers that saw them elevated to the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes, irrespective of their martial prowess. Ezekiel was the one judging if Balthasar was worthy of taking his place among the Deathwing, yet the sergeant was implying that Ezekiel was not even worthy of his place in the Chapter.
Any rebuke remained unspoken. Klaxons wailed loudly and the flight deck was bathed intermittently in red light, indicating that the Sword of Caliban was exiting the warp. Though he did not show it outwardly, Ezekiel could feel himself being wrenched from one realm to another, the difference as stark as night and day. He knew Turmiel felt it too, a psychic frisson from the young Librarian mingling with his own, hoar frost forming on their armour, the temperature around them plunging drastically.
Ezekiel had been through this hundreds of times before, and knew that it would take a few seconds to adjust to being back in real space. But even as he felt himself becoming attuned with the materium, he still couldn’t shake the sense that something wasn’t right. All across the flight deck, the brothers of the Fifth Company could also sense that something was awry. The noise of the warp had been replaced by the sound of something else. Ezekiel realised what it was an instant before Shipmaster Selenaz’s voice crashed across the command channel of the vox.
‘Throne of Terra! We’ve translated right in the middle of a void battle,’ she said, over the sound of frenetic activity in the background. ‘I’ve never seen so many ork vessels.’
Ezekiel could feel the eyes of the other senior Dark Angels upon him, judging him for his erroneous foresight.
‘Are the Navy lines holding?’ Zadakiel’s voice crackled over the vox.
‘Affirmative, but barely. They’re outnumbered at least ten to one and their combat discipline is non-exist
ent,’ Selenaz replied.
‘Get us in as close as you can, shipmaster. We’re going down in the drop pods. You have command up here. Get those Navy vessels organised and hold the greenskins for as long as possible,’ Zadakiel said over the general channel. Instantly, over a hundred Dark Angels filed onto the huge service elevators, normally used to transport vehicles between decks but now the fastest route to the dozen drop pods sat in the belly of the strike cruiser.
The advantage of deploying in drop pods in this situation was twofold. Firstly, though less manoeuvrable than the Thunderhawks they would get to the surface quicker, giving the Dark Angels an extra precious few minutes of preparation if the orks were about to breach the blockade. Secondly, unless boarding actions were called for, Space Marines were no more useful than a Chapter-serf in a void war. Better to be planetside where their fate was in their own hands rather than below decks on a vessel that could be wiped out in the blink of an eye by a lucky shot from an ork ship or suicide run by the commander of a rok.
As expected, Balthasar was at the spearhead of the exodus to the drop pods. Ezekiel was quickly alongside him, their earlier conversation – and business – unfinished.
‘First Squad, with me,’ Ezekiel said, as they descended at speed into the darkness below.
The noise of the space battle intensified in the confines of the elevator shaft, more so when the Sword of Caliban’s own guns opened up and joined the fray. The Dark Angels’ Larraman’s ear implants kicked in, preventing deafness where the Chapter-serfs, still attending to their masters’ needs, temporarily lost their hearing as a result of the din.
