Astra Militarum

by David Annandale, Justin D Hill, Toby Frost, Braden Campbell (epub)

  ‘We have them!’ Creed roared. He was filled with a virtuous fire. It didn’t seem so clear to Kell at that moment. ‘We have them now!’

  Lina and Linday had been swept up. They had caught a ride on a Chimera. Troops clung to it. They were all saying that victory was at hand, that Creed was going to save the day. They saw him standing tall at their fore and believed.

  Cadia was waking and recoiling at the touch of heresy on her soil. She had more to give. Creed could feel it. He felt her fury, and as the wind whipped up, he heard the distant moan of the pylons urging them all on. The ground shook as the Titans engaged.

  He sang the sacred words as Lightning fighters wove and soared, chasing the steaming contrails of invading drop pods. Thunderbolt squadrons swirled around the heads of the heretic Titans. Flights of Vendettas, wing to wing, came in low to the ground and tore into the Chaos forces. Elite kasrkin airborne regiments deployed on grav-chutes, firing on rampaging warbands as they landed.

  And through the maelstrom, Creed led his men. Scattered squads swelled his numbers. Among them was the familiar figure of Major Luka, who was leading an honour guard of five hundred handpicked Whiteshields.

  ‘Luka!’ Creed yelled as the old man saluted him.

  ‘Ursarkar, I’m glad to see you. Where do you need us?’

  Creed did not pause. ‘We have to save the governor.’

  They smashed through a picket line of heavy weapons, then outflanked a Volscani Baneblade, luring it out from its support units and hitting it on both flanks as a company of Hydras kept the skies above them clear.

  But the closer Creed’s army got to the centre of the storm, the tougher the resistance became – and soon they were no longer fighting Volscani heretics, but power-armoured warriors.

  The traitor Space Marines were few in number – fewer than the quantity of drop pods would have suggested – but they were tough. Creed cracked them nonetheless, outflanking, outnumbering, out-shooting. Always on the move, the Cadians were soon within the smoke cloud cast by the burning Leviathans.

  Creed pointed towards the Excubitoi Castellum, which rose above the carnage. It was beset, besieged, but still standing defiantly.

  ‘Keep moving!’ he roared. ‘We are not too late!’

  But the enemy had taken note.

  Through the choking black smoke stalked a huge, hunched figure, black smoke billowing about its baroque brass armour, which dripped with the blood of the corpses chained to its carapace. It snorted fire from its nostrils and stamped a clawed foot. There were cries of panic.

  Darr Vel’s Chimera appeared through the smoke and slewed to a halt. The former prisoner had a plasma pistol thrust into his belt and a harness of melta bombs over one shoulder.

  ‘Darr Vel!’ Creed shouted. ‘It’s time to make your peace with the Emperor. I promised you that chance. I need you to slow that Titan down!’

  The man nodded solemnly and turned to issue orders to his troops.

  It was like hunting for food on Lost Hope. Just… bigger. Darr Vel’s skin prickled. The air roared. Fire blasted behind him and he shouted a warning, too late. He pressed himself against the hull of his Chimera. His hair caught fire, but he barely noticed, as the roar of the flame drowned out most of the screams of his Lost Hopers. Most. Not all.

  He patted out the fire and prepared to move. ‘With me!’ he shouted.

  The remaining Lost Hopers charged forward, heads down, Darr Vel at their fore. The flamer flared again.

  More screams in the darkness of billowing smoke. Somehow Darr Vel’s small group, lying flat in a crater, were still alive. They jumped up and sprinted forward. To the left, Jovet’s mob was almost in range.

  ‘Go!’ Darr Vel indicated them forward. A meltagun fired. An explosive went off. The Titan stamped down. As the foot lifted, Darr Vel glimpsed the glistening remains of Jovet’s men before the swirling smoke hid them all.

  He looked up. Only six men were still with him. He laughed, realising that this was how he would end.

  ‘Damn you, Creed,’ he shouted. ‘From ice world to a fiery death! Let’s get it!’

  He started running. He heard the roar of another flamer blast, then all there was was his own breath, labouring as he gripped the bandolier of melta bombs in his right fist. Within seconds he was in the shadow of the Titan.

  ‘I’ve got you now!’ he screamed.

  A three-toed metal foot swung forward through the gloom. He could smell lubricants and taste the plasma boiling furiously. The foot crunched down twenty feet to his left, the toes, each larger than him, pressing into the earth as the Titan’s weight shifted forward. He was alone. It was up to him. Creed was depending on it. He made his break and felt the other foot swing over his head.

  He could see pistons the size of tanks. The inhuman toes, bending and flexing, the metal creaking as it took the full weight of the Titan. Darr Vel caught one of them. It almost threw him as it lifted up for another ponderous stride. He clung on with both arms. The piston dragged him down and up as the toe flexed. He lost sight of the ground, did not know how much longer he could hold on. He got one hand onto a melta bomb, and set the charge.

  The warning light flashed, slow at first, then more rapidly.

  ‘The Emperor Protects.’ Darr Vel closed his eyes as the melta bombs detonated.

  Creed watched as a foot was torn off the Titan. The behemoth stumbled forward on its ruined leg, metal superstructure groaning as it lost balance and fell nose-forward into the earth. Its machine-spirit wailed as explosions tore through the superstructure, and then its plasma reactor overheated, and one last cataclysmic explosion threw debris spinning across the battlefield.

  Creed hoped Darr Vel was with the Emperor now.

  ‘Keep moving!’ he yelled.

  The ground was thick with empty enemy landers, their armoured ramps open and still. The Excubitoi Castellum rose up like a cliff face before them. Her bottom decks were ruined and broken. Pipes leaked bloody fluids, small fires burned and there were dead Cadians everywhere – shot, disembowelled, decapitated, hanging from windows, slumped against broken blast heads, drowning in their own blood. Hatches lay open.

  ‘Inside!’ he shouted. ‘We take it back.’

  Kell strode through the corpse-choked corridors behind Creed.

  They turned a corner to see a grotesquely armoured Space Marine lying amongst a heap of human dead. ‘Do not look at it!’ Creed warned in a low voice, but Kell could not help himself. The sickening symbols made his head spin. The spiked armour was studded with fresh heads. He gagged and turned away, up a ruined staircase that was slick with blood, keeping to Creed’s side.

  As they rose the din of battle grew louder.

  ‘Quicker!’ Creed urged them as they mounted the ornate stairs.

  They heard a howl and turned. Three traitor Space Marines sprinted towards them, chainswords buzzing.

  Kell stepped before Creed and gestured towards the foe. A bodyguard of kasrkin ran forward, firing from the hip. Hotshot las-rounds punched through power armour with puffs of bloody steam. They riddled the enemy, and one by one they fell.

  The carapace-armoured shock troops took each corridor, each staircase, each room, and the rest of the force followed, securing the chambers and holding them against enemy counter-attack.

  Creed drove the Cadians forward. ‘Save the governor!’ became their war cry as Kell carried the banner of the Cadian Eighth into the very heart of the Excubitoi Castellum.

  ‘Closer!’ Creed urged them as they reached the bridge antechamber. ‘Forward!’

  The damage to the ancient artefact was terrible to behold. Ancient banners, some from the founding of Cadia itself, lay torn and ruined on the floor. Relic caskets had been shattered. The bones of saints and Imperial heroes had been slashed and broken and vellum leaves swirled in the breeze from the open bridge doorway. The floor was sli
ck with blood.

  Creed marched across the antechamber and stopped on the threshold to the bridge. He turned away, face pale, and Kell stepped up to see what was inside.

  Shreds of flesh, guts, dress uniform and gold braid hung from the walls. A pile of fresh heads filled the room. Kell knew many of them. Staff officers. Colonels. Equerries. Even the distinctive white-bearded face of Lord General Jaquias.

  A power armoured giant stepped into the opposite doorway. In one hand, a chain-axe revved. In the other it held the bloody head of Governor Marus Porelska. Its voice came through its vox grilles: inhumanly deep and impossibly ancient and hate-filled.

  ‘I knew you would come,’ the creature laughed as it tossed Porelska’s head towards them. It landed with a splash in a puddle of blood. The chain-axe revved again as the Chaos Space Marine strode towards them. ‘But you’re too late.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Creed demanded.

  ‘I am the future,’ the thing said. ‘I am war. I am death. I am carnage.’

  ‘You are dead, traitor,’ Kell roared.

  The Chaos Space Marine laughed. Its chain-axe buzzed in its hand as it roared and charged, fast and furious. Kell lashed out and caught the axe in his power fist as it swung down. There was a screech of tearing metal and the weapon exploded, hot metal teeth scything through the chamber. The traitor Space Marine staggered back and Kell swung and stabbed low. His power sword sheared through armour and flesh to hit bone, but his foe seemed to feel no pain. It roared again and kicked Kell aside, sending him thudding into the wall. The colour sergeant’s power sword fell and hit the ground, the energy that wreathed it extinguishing.

  The Space Marine turned on Creed and swiped at him with gauntleted hands. Creed ducked once, twice, and then threw himself backwards.

  ‘The sword,’ Kell moaned as he tried to push himself up from the floor.

  Creed’s looked around and threw himself in the direction of the blade. He fumbled, and then his fingers closed around it. He saw movement and brought the sword up to parry, but it wasn’t his enemy that approached. He looked up into the face of Commissar Aldrad. The commissar was ragged and bloodied and a rough bandage was tied around a stump where his left hand had been. In his right was his bolt pistol, and it was pointed at the traitor Space Marine.

  ‘Aim!’ Aldrad spat. The Cadians behind him levelled their lasguns. Creed pulled himself to his feet and held up a hand.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘This one is mine. Let me send it back to the hell from whence it came.’

  It had been a long time since he had handled a sword in battle, but the old training came back to him. He held the sword two handed. It was a standard pattern, with familiar balance and familiar weight. He thumbed the activation stud and it leapt into life. It was good to feel the static in the air as blue light flickered along the blade. He began to drive the Chaos Space Marine back with sweeps of crackling energy.

  His opponent bulled forward and Creed parried a punch, relishing the growl of pain as the glowing blade sliced through the Space Marine’s gauntlet and bit flesh. The traitor pulled back again and Creed pushed in. His first stroke tore a spike from its armour. The second failed to connect. The third opened a wide gash in the chestplate. Creed ducked a fist, sidestepped, and made a wild stab that went through armour, belly, and armour again. He dragged the blade out, and a flood of black blood and bile poured out of the wound as the traitor Space Marine fell to its knees.

  ‘You cannot win,’ it said.

  ‘Then we shall die trying!’ Creed snarled.

  He swung once more. The head of the traitor tumbled from its shoulders. The headless torso swayed and Creed gave it a contemptuous kick backwards.

  ‘Here!’ he said, and helped Kell pick himself up from the floor. The colour sergeant’s face was pale and his right arm hung useless by his side. Together they limped through the bridge. The carnage was appalling. Creed could feel the horror of the last battle here.

  ‘Hundreds of men…’ he said, visualising what must have happened. ‘They tried to barricade the blast doors… When the traitors broke through they protected Governor Porelska with their own bodies…’

  ‘And they all died,’ said Kell. ‘Bravely. Like heroes.’

  Creed put a hand against the wall to steady himself, but touched blood, wet and warm. He pulled his hand away and wiped it clean on his fatigues. ‘Cover them up,’ he said.

  ‘By their deaths shall we know them,’ Kell said and made the sign of the aquila.

  Creed was spent. ‘I need fresh air,’ he said. ‘If there’s any out there.’

  He picked his way over the body of a dead kasrkin to the balcony doors, where the gold-worked red velvet curtains hung in strips. He pushed them aside and stepped over the threshold.

  All across the Landing Fields, heretics were making their last stands.

  ‘The battle is won, but the killing never ends,’ said Creed bitterly. He walked over to the railings and looked down. He saw devastation and ruin – wrecked armour, the slag of burning Titans, wounded and dying men.

  He watched as a Legio Ignatum Reaver casually pumped three shots from its volcano cannon into the last intact Volscani Leviathan. On the third hit the Leviathan exploded. The blast of heat was so intense it warmed his face.

  But Ursarkar E. Creed felt nothing. All he could see before him was defeat, death, disaster.

  Kell stopped on the threshold and looked out at Creed. The general looked small, broken. Kell turned to go back inside.

  ‘Stay, Jarran,’ Creed said.

  Kell stepped forward. He heard a noise behind him and looked round to see Aldrad, pale from blood loss. The colour sergeant motioned him forward. Together, the three men looked out at the ruin of Tyrok Fields.

  ‘We failed,’ Creed said. ‘We won the day, but we failed.’

  Kell took in a deep breath. He tasted blood and smoke and burning flesh. He had nothing to say. In the distance, one of the last traitor ships fired into the clouds.

  ‘Why are they fleeing?’ Aldrad asked.

  Creed shrugged. ‘Their job was done.’

  There was a cough behind them. Kell turned to see Castor carrying a vox-unit. ‘General, you should take this,’ he said. Creed took it and listened intently.

  There was a moment’s pause, then Creed said, ‘No. Governor Porelska is dead. I am Castellan Creed of the Cadian Eighth. I led the counter-attack on the Excubitoi Castellum. We… were too late.’

  There was another pause.

  Kell looked out. Far below a flamer flared. He could not tell whose it was. A Valkyrie hovered and fired off a salvo of anti-personnel rockets. They were so distant the flashes came almost a second before the firecracker patter of explosions.

  ‘Yes, Warmaster Ryse,’ said Creed. ‘I will secure the Excubitoi Castellum and establish who is still alive, then await your arrival.’

  Creed handed the vox-unit back to Castor and waited until the trooper had gone back inside.

  ‘Jarran, Aldrad,’ Creed said. ‘Ryse told me that the Governor Secundus is also feared lost. All attempts to contact him at Kasr Vazan have failed.’ He gripped the railings with both hands. ‘They have struck the Imperium at our most defiant citadel, and found us lacking.’

  The sun was setting. It was a dull red disk through the smoke and dust of battle.

  Creed’s face was grim. ‘Look. Day has ended on Cadia. The long night has begun.’

  The Eye of Terror filled the sky with a sickening bruise of purple light.

  Baleful red fires still burned across Tyrok Fields, and the moaning of wounded men drifted on the air as medicae teams did their best to find and treat survivors.

  It was two hours after sunset when Creed arrived at the warmaster’s Leviathan, Sacramentum, with Kell and Commissar Aldrad in attendance. The battle had been so intense that it felt strange to be walking down unruined
corridors to stand in an intact room amongst men who were not the enemy.

  Creed limped as he climbed the steps. A thumb-sized piece of shrapnel had been removed from his thigh. He hadn’t felt it until the battle was over, but now every muscle in his body ached. He had eaten nothing and drunk only a flask of water all day. His hangover was returning with a vengeance.

  ‘See if you can find something to drink,’ he muttered to Kell as they saluted the two kasrkin who stood at the entrance to the Sacramentum’s feast hall.

  The room echoed as Creed strode in. Some of the fresher looking officers had flown in from the more distant kasr. They looked almost panicked and unsure. They had not been in the battle. They had not seen it. Creed could tell from their eyes that they hated not having been there.

  The survivors had a weary look about them. Warmaster Ryse was trying to be jocular with his left arm in a sling, and a lump torn off his left ear. Sacramentum’s crew had repelled boarders. The warmaster had fought with great bravery, so his staff reported.

  Creed had heard all about it, but he had been too weary to take it in. Everyone on Tyrok Fields that day had a tale to tell. Everyone had been through hell. Some had been lucky enough to survive.

  Too many had not.

  Around Warmaster Ryse stood the few surviving members of the Cadian governing council, retired generals and castellans. Lord General Gruber was there, his head bandaged, but his monocle unbroken. Had it really only been the day before, Creed thought, that he and Gruber had clashed aboard the Excubitoi Castellum? He met the man’s cold blue stare with defiance, only looking away when Ryse boomed out, ‘Creed! Good to see you! Unwounded?’

  Creed patted his leg, and pulled a face. A lump of shrapnel was as good as untouched.

  Ryse nodded. ‘Now are we all here?’ He made a signal and the feast hall doors were closed. Ryse’s voice lost its jocular note. ‘Well. Welcome. I am glad to see you all. For those of you who are unaware, Governor Primus Marus Porelska was killed today in defence of Cadia. Governor Secundus Karwyn is feared lost.’