Knights of the Imperium

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Thexton! Get your people out of here right bloody now!’

  Their screams of pain cut Malcolm deep. He knew all too well the horror of being a fleshy mortal on the ground when these murder-beasts were in the wind. He saw a Sacristan punctured through his chest by one gaunt and lifted for another to snap its jaws shut on his head. Bulk servitors stood mutely as they were disembowelled. Human labourers were sliced down without mercy and left to bleed out from horrifically cruel cuts.

  Men and women were pounced on as they fled for the gate, scything claws stabbing them repeatedly in the back. Acid saliva burned them. Spitting darts of razor chitin sliced their legs out from under them.

  The gaunts fell on them all, killing and feasting.

  Malcolm’s stubber cut torn-meat lines through the tyranid assault, each solid slug bursting a gaunt apart. Their vital fluid was black and oily, not really blood at all, but some alien ichor masquerading as blood.

  The call of hunting horns told him the location of the rest of his Knights.

  Garratt had followed his orders and was making his way to the gate. Farrimond corralled a diminishing host with his stubbers and sweeps of his reaper. The roaring teeth of his blade threw hunks of alien flesh fifty metres through the air.

  Vasey held a choke-point at a culvert whose shutter remained treacherously open. Alien creatures poured inside from beyond the walls. Malcolm didn’t know how they could possibly have found a way in.

  Every entrance was supposed to have been sealed.

  However this vanguard force had gotten into Verdus Ferrox, Malcolm wasn’t about to let them reach the city proper. He’d be damned if he’d allow the forward elements of the xenoswarms into Vondrak Prime through House Cadmus.

  Enoch and Silus appeared at his side, weapons hot.

  ‘Do we ride?’ asked Enoch.

  ‘A hard counter to break them,’ said Silus. ‘Containment and slaughter. Just like the Cull.’

  Malcolm wanted nothing more than to charge headlong into the gathering mass of alien monsters. To stomp and cut and blast them to unrecognisable meat paste.

  But this wasn’t like the Cull at all.

  All a Knight had to do there was kill and kill again. Now Malcolm had a duty of care to those around him.

  Roland had entrusted him with a duty, the honour of which it had taken Lady Cordelia’s words to make him see. The future of House Cadmus was in Malcolm’s hands, though not as she had suggested in the form of the house consorts and its children.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Protect Thexton’s Sacristans. We lose them, we lose Cadmus. They’re our prime objective. That and making sure these damn things don’t get out of here.’

  Malcolm’s enhanced situational awareness painted a vivid picture of the battle for Verdus Ferrox. He issued his orders in clipped Raisan battle-cant and the Knights spread out.

  They killed the beasts attacking the Sacristans, clearing them away from their charges with accurate bursts of stubber fire and pinpoint thermal lance strikes. Some of their own were lost in the shredding barrages, but better some than all.

  ‘Like the First Knights, eh?’ said Vasey, stomping down on a darting pack of gaunts. ‘Shepherds keeping the livestock safe from the monsters.’

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Malcolm, shifting to his reserve stock of stubber shells. ‘Except I don’t plan on eating this flock.’

  ‘There’s a few with enough meat to spare,’ laughed Vasey as his stubbers ripped through a pack of gaunts bounding around the flanks. ‘Perhaps they could–’

  He never finished his sentence.

  The head-section of his Knight exploded in a roiling fireball of white-green fire.

  ‘Imperator!’ swore Malcolm, as arcing whips of lightning coruscated over the molten ruin of Vasey’s carapace. He saw a charred body wreathed in spectral flames fall from the Knight.

  A ghost trail of shimmering fire reached back to the culvert he’d previously brought down. Enormous chunks of rubble floated impossibly in the air around it.

  ‘Raisa’s horns, what is that?’ said Enoch.

  A bloated creature with a serpentine body folded back on itself hovered in the midst of the floating rock. Its head was an elongated hydrocephalic nightmare of rippling flesh and segmented plates. Atrophied limbs and vestigial appendages hung from a body undulant with peristaltic motion.

  A shimmering haze of psychic energy hung around it. Malcolm’s gun-auspex struggled to acquire it.

  ‘Zoanthrope,’ spat Malcolm.

  He pushed out his armour’s power systems, charging towards the suspended beast. Its head turned towards him. Fangs bared and black eyes glimmered with corposant.

  ‘Stay on station!’ ordered Malcolm. ‘Get the Sacristans clear.’

  His battle cannon bellowed again. More bodies disintegrated and blew apart. Even those beyond the immediate blast had their internal structure pulped by the overpressure.

  The zoanthrope remained unharmed, the fire and shock of the blast morphing around its body as though it existed in its own personal bubble of space. Packs of gaunts raced to meet him, praetorians to the withered beast.

  His reaper blade swung and a score of beasts died. Black ichor sprayed from sundered chitinous bodies, and he revelled in their screeches of pain. Stubber fire flensed them. Bodies burst and ripped open.

  Malcolm’s bulk was a weapon too. He stomped with heavy feet, crushing bodies with every step.

  He was close now, almost close enough to strike.

  He saw the swollen zoanthrope’s flesh pulse with its own internal illumination. That same light shone in the eyes of the gaunts snapping around him, as though it drew some vital essence out of them.

  A shrieking blast of the same white-green fire that killed Vasey thrust towards Malcolm like a lance. He threw up his ion shield and felt the searing heat of impact. Malcolm convulsed on his Throne Mechanicus, his arm feeling like it was bathed in melta fire.

  Emerald sparks exploded from his pict-slate and fell from the cabin roof. Though he knew his flesh arm was unhurt, the repercussions from the connection pain would be just as real.

  His Knight staggered, gyros straining to keep him upright. Its stumbling steps crushed a handful of gaunts, but more were surrounding him with every passing second.

  Malcolm righted the Knight and looked up into the beast’s eyes. They had dilated monstrously, and in those black, soulless orbs he saw himself die a thousand deaths, torn apart by its guardians and devoured morsel by morsel. He saw Cassia stripped to the bone by wriggling, maggot-like things with more teeth than body. He saw his children-yet-to-be cut apart by sickle-blade limbs and everything he ever cared about subsumed into a chittering hive where every screed of being was enslaved to the will of a monstrous overmind.

  ‘Get out of my head!’ yelled Malcolm, triggering a blast of ’slaught from his chem-dispensers. The Sacristans warned him against the use of so dangerously addictive a stimm, but right now he needed a dose of pure, unadulterated rage.

  Pain bored into every neural receptor in his skull, and Malcolm screamed as it ripped through his body. It filled his veins with fire, his mind with towering fury at the very presence of this abominable creature.

  It was no longer a zoanthrope, just a beast to be exterminated. It didn’t deserve the recognition of a name. Malcolm barged into the monster, slamming his head against the armoured carapace of its head. Bony plates split apart and milky efflorescent fluid gushed out.

  He felt its pain course through him and revelled in it.

  ‘I’m going to use your skin to wipe my arse,’ he said and rammed his roaring reaper blade into its writhing underbody.

  The fleshy sac of its vestigial form ruptured along its length at the tearing impact. Malcolm ripped the blade up. Soft, squirming entrails spilled out in a flood.

  The zoanthrope fell from his blade in sopping chunk
s. Its flesh was devoid of mass, like a punctured fuel bladder. The rocks floating in the air fell to the ground, and an utterly alien death scream blew outwards like the blast wave of an artillery strike.

  The swarming gaunts faltered in their attack, screeching and writhing in symbiotic pain. For an instant, Malcolm dared hope that this was the only creature directing the ravenous packs.

  But moments later, the gaunts swarmed him, climbing his legs with desperate, slithering, scraping leaps, claws and fangs pulling them up his armour.

  Still mad with the ’slaught, Malcolm slammed himself into the wall. Gaunts shrieked as they were crushed. His reaper tore others from his body, but not enough. He saw a trio of beasts scramble onto his head. He didn’t need auspex or surveyors to see them – they were right in front of him.

  Claws slashed down the armourglass of his canopy, leaving deep scores. Fang-filled jaws worked up and down on the glass, leaving grooves of acidic saliva in their wake.

  The eyes of the gaunts were empty as they savaged the glass of his armour. He saw nothing. Not hatred, not anger or any emotion he might have expected from a foe doing their damnedest to end him.

  Just a blind urge to kill. Because that was what they were bred to do. Because a shoal mentality drove them into a frenzy. They weren’t creatures in their own right, just fragments in a hive, specks of dirt in a sandstorm.

  They exploded all over the glass.

  Malcolm felt the impact of multiple stubber rounds. Not powerful enough to harm him or penetrate his armour, but enough to register. Anger touched him at the thought he had been fired upon by his own warriors, but he instigated an emergency synaptic flush to get the ’slaught from his brain.

  Garratt rode into view, his armour scarred and torn around the lower plates of his legs. Alien blood soaked him to the waist. Smoke drooled from his twin stubbers.

  ‘You’re clear,’ said Garratt.

  ‘The gate?’ said Malcolm, his mouth dry and gummy with stimm-residue and neural purgatives.

  ‘Sealed. The Mubarizan are there with two companies of troop carriers and super-heavies,’ said Garratt. ‘Three Baneblades and a Stormhammer. More on the way.’

  ‘The Sacristans?’

  ‘Safe,’ said Garratt. ‘Not all of them, but enough. That was a good call, Sir Malcolm.’

  Malcolm nodded, knowing he was in for a hell of a rough ride when the stimm-hangover kicked in.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘They’ll call this a victory.’

  Cordelia held Sir Farrimond’s hand as the medicae finished binding his chest and shoulders in a synth-skin wrap. Bio-acid had eaten through the carapace of his Knight and drooled onto Farrimond’s recumbent form.

  The battle of Verdus Ferrox had been over for ten hours, but Colonel Rukanah’s flamer units were still clearing the last of the beasts from the forge complex. In saving Assembler Thexton’s Sacristans, Malcolm had saved House Cadmus, though Cordelia wondered if he truly appreciated the scale of what he’d achieved.

  But it been victory won at a terrible cost.

  Jon Vasey was dead, as was Axl Roddam. Farrimond and Enoch were wounded, and Malcolm’s armour was going to need extensive repairs to get it walking again.

  Farrimond groaned as the last of the bandage was tied off, and Cordelia squeezed his hand. The young man had refused pain balms until Cordelia ordered him to stop being so stupid. One of the house’s newly elevated Knights, Mikel Farrimond had yet to choose a consort (and still believed it would be him that chose) and was full of that heady cocktail of idiotic youth and ego that made him think he was indestructible.

  He looked so young.

  His features weren’t yet drawn tight over his skull by the constant strain of being bound to a mechanised war machine that took a little of its rider each time they bonded.

  Had Roland ever been that young? She supposed he had, though she could barely remember the time before he’d gone through the Ritual of Becoming. He’d been young and dashing, as they all were, but even before he’d sat on the Throne Mechanicus, there had been a refusal to compromise that had drawn Cordelia to him.

  That trait had been amplified by the ritual and had only grown stronger over the years. She’d nurtured his sense of dissatisfaction with the Mechanicus, and when the priests of Mars had let slip their hold over Cadmus, it had taken only the slightest push to convince Roland to cast off the Cog.

  House Cadmus was bound to the Emperor and always would be.

  ‘Thank you, my lady,’ said Farrimond, as the medicae departed to treat another poor unfortunate.

  ‘You were very brave, Sir Farrimond,’ she said, but his eyes were already slipping closed as the balms took effect. Cordelia laid his hand down beside him and rose to her feet, smoothing down her dress.

  ‘Very brave,’ she said again, turning and making her way down the central corridor of the medicae building. Three hundred beds of wounded lined either side of the wide chamber like pews in a templum, where those in pain came to give reverence to an ever-hungry god of suffering.

  She pushed that thought aside as unworthy and dangerous.

  This was but one floor among fifteen. One medicae building out of seven. The wounded from the collapsing southern front were spilling from the medicae primus to this overflow structure, and it wouldn’t take long for it to exceed its capacity.

  Cordelia wasn’t the only one of the consorts who’d come to give succour to the wounded; the women of Cadmus were spread throughout the various levels of the building. Aeliana played her viola softly at the far end of the chamber, as Cassia read aloud from the book of Sebastian Thor. Aeliana’s music and Cassia’s words combined seamlessly to help alleviate the torments of those injured in the Emperor’s service.

  The music came to an end as Cassia reached the conclusion of the verses spoken by Thor at the death of the insane High Lord. A few of the wounded clapped, most just smiled, even through their pain. A few called out for more, but Cordelia stopped and raised her hands.

  ‘Brave souls,’ she said. ‘My dear sisters need rest before returning to you. Would you have Aeliana wear her fingers to the bone or have Cassia bereft of voice? Look to your own courage and fortitude for a time and they will return to you soon, I promise.’

  Cordelia’s words had the desired effect, and the wounded grit their teeth and bore their hurts stoically. To do otherwise would be to admit weakness before a lady and demand of them more than could honourably be asked. Cordelia nodded to her fellow consorts, and they passed from the main ward-chamber of the medicae building.

  Once beyond its serried ranks of injured, the consorts found solitude in a small chapel space, bathed in amber light and filled with the cloying scent of long-dead flowers. A modest statue of the Emperor was placed in a softly glowing alcove, kneeling beside a wounded soldier and tending to his wounds with the power of His divine light alone.

  They took it in turns to kneel and bow their heads to the Master of Mankind, before sitting on the well-worn wooden benches. Aeliana massaged stiff fingers and Cassia rubbed tired eyes.

  ‘A long night,’ said Aeliana.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ said Cordelia. ‘There’s a lot of wounded men in there who’ll survive thanks to you both.’

  ‘What did we do, really?’ said Cassia.

  ‘Don’t underestimate the power of a pretty face when it comes to wounded soldiers,’ said Cordelia. ‘You saw their faces when you stopped playing and reading. You helped, and you’re going to keep helping. Once the tyranids surround Vondrak Prime, there’s going to be a lot more wounded.’

  It was a sobering thought and the three women sat in silent contemplation for a moment.

  ‘Someone’s going to swing for this, aren’t they?’ said Cassia.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Aeliana.

  ‘You should have heard Malcolm when he came back to our chambers after
the battle. The language he used…’

  ‘Worse than normal?’ said Cordelia.

  Cassia nodded slowly. ‘Much worse.’

  ‘Any reason in particular?’ asked Cordelia. ‘Other than the obvious, I mean.’

  ‘He was all set to skin Assembler Thexton alive and wear his skin as a cloak,’ said Cassia. ‘He went on at some length about all the horrible things he was going to do to him.’

  ‘Thexton? Why?’

  ‘Because the tyranids got into Verdus Ferrox somehow,’ said Cordelia. ‘And Thexton’s Sacristans were in charge of sealing off every way in.’

  ‘Clearly they forgot one.’

  Cordelia shook her head. She’d spoken to Farrimond, and his account of how the battle unfolded didn’t match up to the notion that a single entrance to the forge complex had been overlooked or improperly sealed.

  ‘What is it, Cordelia?’ said Aeliana. ‘You’ve got that look in your eye that means someone’s in trouble.’

  ‘I know Thexton,’ she said. ‘He’s meticulous in that painful way only servants of the Machine-God can be. However many entrances to Verdus Ferrox there are, he wouldn’t have missed one.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ asked Aeliana.

  ‘That someone let the beasts in,’ said Cordelia.

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  Cordelia sighed. She hated being right all the time.

  ‘Someone who stood to benefit from House Cadmus having no Sacristans left to maintain its Knights,’ she said. ‘An organisation who’d be happy to offer us freshly trained Sacristans if only we’d reaffirm our allegiance to Mars.’

  ‘You think the Mechanicus did this to us?’ gasped Aeliana, her cheeks ruddy with rising fury.

  ‘I think they’re so desperate to win us back, they’d stoop to any level to see it happen.’

  Cassia brushed a strand of hair from her face. Cordelia saw the look in her eyes. At once sheepish and eager.

  ‘What?’ said Cordelia.

  Cassia smiled. ‘A few days ago I was approached by an adept who called himself Nemonix. He told me some interesting things.’