Logun’s human eye is wide and wary as he takes the script from Raine. As he reads it, he pales further and his hand starts to shake.
‘What does it say?’ Raine asks.
Logun clears his throat. It takes two tries.
‘It is an order confirmation for an artillery strike,’ he says. ‘A full-scale bombardment of a key Sighted-held territory in the western quarter of Whend.’
‘The grid reference?’ Raine asks.
Logun’s hand is shaking even more, now.
‘Oh-six-five,’ Logun says.
‘Who provided the grid reference?’ Raine asks.
‘The strike was authorised by the Balfaran command council,’ Logun stammers. ‘By Generals Sylar and Lafoil–’
‘I did not ask you who authorised it,’ Raine says. ‘I asked who provided the grid reference.’
Logun exhales a shuddering breath.
‘I did,’ he says. ‘But I do not make mistakes, commissar. This is a failing of the artillery positioning. Of the ground team. They must have miscalculated their firing angles.’
‘The order script says oh-six-five,’ Raine says. ‘The ground team hit the target you told them to hit. The Bridge of Graces, and the Imperial troops crossing it.’
‘No,’ Logun stammers. ‘No, I–’
‘Not only that,’ Raine says, ‘but the script goes on to detail your request for the deletion of that order from command group records. That would be a strange thing to do, were you unaware of your own mistake.’
Logun keeps his eyes on the script. He is quiet for a long moment. Raine hears the timepiece in her pocket tick five times.
‘The days here are so long,’ Logun says, eventually. ‘And the heat. The suns. I did not realise that I had misread the grid reference until the order had been authorised. By then, I had no opportunity to stop it. I swear, I never intended to cause harm. I was tired. Exhausted. It was an honest mistake.’
Raine goes into her coat pocket and takes out a roll of parchment. It is handwritten and dirtied by her own bloody fingerprints. She holds it out, and Logun takes it, warily.
‘What is this?’ he asks, as he unrolls it.
‘Names,’ Raine says. ‘Those are the names of the forty-nine Antari dead. The twenty-eight wounded. They are the cost of your honest mistake, tacticae officer.’
Raine waits while Logun reads the list. She doesn’t have to see it to remember the names. When he reaches the end of it, a tear is sliding from his unaugmented eye.
‘Are you here to kill me?’ he asks.
‘No,’ Raine says. ‘You will be condemned by the Commissariat representative attached to the Balfar command group. I merely came here to show you why.’
Logun falls quiet again. After a long moment, he nods.
‘Thank you, commissar,’ he says.
Raine nods, and then she turns and walks out of the small, spare room without another word, leaving Logun alone amongst the dead.
About the Author
Rachel Harrison is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 short stories ‘Execution’ and ‘A Company of Shadows’, featuring the character Commissar Severina Raine. She has also written the short story ‘Dirty Dealings’ for Necromunda, as well as a number of other Warhammer 40,000 short stories including ‘The Third War’ and ‘Dishonoured’.
An extract from Dark Imperium: Plague War
Weak light bobbed through pitchy black, casting a pale round that grew and shrank upon polished blue marble quarried on a world long ago laid waste. The hum of a grav motor sawed at the quiet of the abandoned hall, though not loudly enough to banish the peace of ages that lay upon it. The lamp was dim as candlelight, and greatly obscured by the iron lantern framing it. The angles of the servo-skull that bore the lantern further cut the glow, but even in the feeble luminance the stone gleamed with flecks of gold. The floor awoke for brief moments at its caress, glinting with a nebula’s richness, before the servo-skull moved on and the paving’s glory was lost to the dark again.
The lonely figure of a man walked at the edge of the light, sometimes embraced by it completely, more often reduced to a collection of shadows and mellow highlights at its edge. The hood of his rough homespun robe was pulled over his head. Sandals woven of cord chased the light at a steady pace. The circle of light was small, but the echo of the man’s footsteps revealed the space it traversed as vast. Less could be discerned about the man, were there anyone there to see him. He was a priest. Little else could be said besides that. It would certainly not be obvious to a casual observer he was militant-apostolic to the Lord Commander. He did not dress as men of his office ordinarily would, in brocade and jewels. He did not seem exalted. He certainly did not feel so. To himself, and to those poor souls he offered the succour of the Emperor’s blessing, he was simply Mathieu.
Mathieu was a man of faith, and to him the Space Marines seemed faithless, ignorant of the true majesty of the Emperor’s divinity, but the Mortuis Ad Monumentum had the air of sanctity nevertheless.
Mathieu liked it for that reason.
Beyond the slap of the priest’s shoes and the whine of the skull, the silence in the Mortuis Ad Monumentum was so total, the sense of isolation so complete, that not even the background thrum of the giant engines pushing the Macragge’s Honour through the warp intruded. The rest of the ship vibrated, sometimes violently, sometimes softly, the growl of the systems always there. Not where the priest walked. The stillness of the ancient hall would not allow it. Within its confines time itself held its breath.
Mathieu had spent his quieter days exploring the hall. Its most singular features were the statues thronging the margins. They were not just in ones or twos, effigies given space to be walked around and admired, nor were they ensconced in alcoves to decorate or commemorate. No, there were crowds of stone men, in places forty deep, all Adeptus Astartes in ancient marks of armour. It may be that they were placed with care once, but no longer, and further into the hall, the more jumbled their arrangements became. The hall had been breached in days gone by, and the statues destroyed. Untidy heaps of limbs were bulldozed carelessly aside and ugly patching marked wounds from ancient times.
The warriors remembered by the statues had died ten thousand years before Mathieu’s birth. Perhaps they had even fallen in the Emperor’s wars to create the Imperium itself. Such an incredible length of years, hard to comprehend, and yet now the being who had led these self-same dead men commanded the ship again.
It dizzied Mathieu that he served a son of the Emperor. He could not quite believe it, even after all that had happened, all that he had seen.
Mathieu stopped in the dark where a group of statues huddled together. White stone glowed grey in the gloom. He had the terrifying notion that they had come alive and gathered to block his path, a phalanx of ghosts angered by profanity. He put aside the thought. He ignored the cold hand of fear creeping up his back. He had come off course, nothing more. It was easy enough to get lost in a hall half a mile wide and almost as long.
His servo-skull bore a large HV upon its forehead. By the letter V alone he called it. He could not bring himself to refer to it by her name.
‘V,’ he said. His voice was pure and strong. It cut the shadows and frightened back the dark. Mathieu was an unimposing man, young, slight, but his voice was remarkable; a weapon greater than the worn laspistol he carried on his left hip, or the chainsword he bore into battle. Loud and commanding before his congregations, it seemed tiny in the face of the dead past, but like a silver bell chiming deep in winter-stilled woods, it was clear and bright and lovely.
V emitted a flat, static-laced melody of acknowledgement.
‘Ascend five feet. Elevate lamp, pan left to right.’
The skull’s motors pulsed. It rose up into the high voids of the monumentum. The light abandoned Mathieu, angling instead for the still figures surrounding him. Stone
faces leapt from the dark, as if snatching the chance to be remembered, quickly drowning again in the black as V turned away. For a moment Mathieu’s fear came back. He did not recognise where he was, until V’s pale lamplight washed over a Space Marine captain of some unremembered era, the right arm held so proudly aloft broken off at the elbow. This warrior he recognised.
Mathieu breathed in relief. ‘Descend to original height. Rotate lantern downwards to light my way. Proceed.’
V voiced its fractured compliance. There were pretensions to musicality in the signal, but the limited vox-unit was fifth hand at least, scavenged like all V’s other fittings, and overuse had blunted its harmonies.
‘Proceed to the hermitage, quickly now. My time for this duty is running out.’
V banked around and swept onwards. Mathieu picked up his pace to keep up.
The Adeptus Astartes pretended to disdain worship. It was well known among the Adeptus Ministorum that they did not regard the Emperor as a god. Mathieu had known this all through his calling. The truth had proved to be not so simple. On the ship there were many shrines, decorated lovingly with images of death, and containing the bones of heroes in reliquaries that rivalled those of the most lauded saint in their ostentation. The Ultramarines’ cult was strong, though they did not worship. In chapels that denied religion their skull-masked priests protested loudly about the human nature of the Emperor and the primarchs while venerating them as gods in all but name. Their practice of honour, duty and obedience was conducted with a fanatical devotion.
There was an element of wilful blindness to their practices, thought Mathieu.
The way the Adeptus Astartes reacted to Roboute Guilliman bordered on awe. From the beginning Guilliman had warned Mathieu himself not to be worshipful, that he was not the son of a god. The priest had witnessed how irritated the primarch became with those who did not heed his words. And yet, these godless sons of his looked upon him, and they could barely hide their fervour.
Mathieu did as he had been told. He affected to see the man Guilliman wished to be, but his familiarity with the primarch was largely an act. Mathieu did revere the primarch, sincerely and deeply.
Previous militant-apostolics had carved themselves out a little realm in Guilliman’s palace spire atop the giant battleship. The position came with appropriately luxurious quarters. Some time before Mathieu’s tenure the largest room had been converted into a chapel of the Imperial Cult. It was gaudy, too concerned with expressions of wealth and influence and not faith. Mathieu had done his best to make it more austere. He removed some of the more vulgar fixtures, replaced statues of ancient cardinals with those of his favourite saints. There had been a sculpture of the Emperor in Glory standing proudly, sword in hand, upon the altar. Mathieu had replaced that with an effigy of the Emperor in Service; a grimacing corpse bound to the Golden Throne. Mathieu had always preferred that representation for it honoured the great sacrifice the Emperor made for His species. The Emperor’s service to mankind was so much more important than His aspects as a warrior, ruler, scientist or seer. Mathieu always tried to follow the example of the Emperor in Service, giving up what little comfort he had to aid the suffering mass of humanity.
The chapel was tainted by the dishonesties of holy men. He preferred to lead worship with the ship’s bonded crew in their oily churches. He maintained the private chapel only because the display was expected of him. He rarely prayed there.
For his private devotions he came down to this deserted cult monument of irreligious men.
At the back of the hall was a small charnel house, where the stacked skulls of fallen heroes were cemented in grim patterns. The dust lay thick on all its decoration when Mathieu had discovered it. Nobody had been there for a long time.
Click here to buy Dark Imperium: Plague War.
A Black Library Publication
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
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Cover illustration by Dave Gallagher.
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