by Rob Sanders
‘Acknowledge the order,’ Heiss said to him. ‘And wish them luck. Send our regards to the pontifex. Inform him that the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor Apotheon will do the God-Emperor’s work in the heavens and that we shall remain on this vox-frequency for as long as we can. Apotheon out.’
Heiss looked up at Gnarls, who gave her another, unhappy nod.
‘It’s down to you now,’ he told her simply, which was probably the nicest thing he’d ever said to her.
‘Helm, set an equatorial intercept course and accelerate to ramming speed.’
‘Aye.’
‘Mister Randt, open channels with the portside and starboard gun-decks, as well as the keel lance section. Have the enginseer informed that the lance is about to fire.’
‘Yes, lieutenant.’
‘Padre Gnarls…’
‘Yes, lieutenant?’
‘Would you be so good as to join the boatswain and help organise the repelling parties. I will keep Apotheon out of the enemy’s grasp, but should they grapple us I would like all airlocks and exterior bulkheads welded shut and barricaded from the inside. If they want in, let’s at least force them to cut their way in.’
‘I would be happy to represent your interests amongst the repelling parties, lieutenant. May the God-Emperor be with you.’
‘And with you, padre.’
With that the preacher left the bridge to seek out a weapon and the boatswain.
As the defence monitor’s reinforced Voss prow dropped, the approaching Cholercaust fleet filled the lancet screen. It was colossal, larger than any Imperial fleet Heiss had seen gathered, and she had seen a few, having served on a Navy cutter above Ultrageddon as a young ensign. It held no tactical configuration, with vessels spread far and wide like an ugly smear across the darkness of space. Smaller vessels didn’t bother to keep station on their larger counterparts and cruisers held no formation at all. The armada’s shape and organisation was merely a result of the fastest vessels, and most fervid, engine-overloading captains, streaking out in front, while the swarm of fat freighters, berserker-laden giga-tankers, renegade Guard transports and Traitor Astartes vessels formed a miasma of frustration, hatred and rage behind. About the fleet swarmed sub-light gunships, brigs, tugs and small system ships, each carrying their own blood-crazed crews and killers. Behind the armada trailed a tail of wrecks and burn-outs: damaged, crippled and engine-cored vessels that still burst at the bulkheads with murderous hordes but were forced to either limp on behind the main fleet or be towed by other craft.
The Cholercaust had arrived and it was ready to disgorge the insane, the bloodthirsty and the daemonic on the tiny cemetery world that was its prey. The defence monitor’s feeble engines pushed the heavily-armoured vessel towards ramming speed; Heiss had the Apotheon come at the tip of the approaching fleet from the pole.
‘W-w-where’s the commander?’ Randt put to Heiss. The midshipman expected to see his captain on the bridge during such a serious engagement.
‘The commander is indisposed,’ the lieutenant called back. ‘Now, ready lance!’
‘Lance charging,’ the midshipman answered.
‘Find me a target, Mister Randt,’ Heiss ordered, and watched as the defence monitor’s runebank spat out a list of trajectories. Heiss couldn’t imagine what the monstrous Chaos captains called their vessels now, but the list of missing, stolen, surrendered, mutinous and captured merchantmen that made up the Cholercaust’s vanguard streamed across the screen. ‘Magnify,’ Heiss called. A lancet screen blinked before closing on the approaching rush of vessels. The flanks of the ships displayed faded names and designations: the Aurigan, Coquette, the Trazior Franchise, Sunpiper.
‘Cultships, Mister Randt,’ Heiss told him. ‘Seized freighters packed with Chaotics and volunteer degenerates, no doubt.’
‘I have a target, commander,’ Randt told her. ‘A positive identification. Frigate, Spite, Goremongers Space Marine Chapter.’
‘That’s more like it. Target that renegade Adeptus Astartes escort.’
‘Enginarium reports lance charged. Awaiting your order.’
‘Mister Randt?’
‘Target lock: thorax and batteries.’
Heiss stared at the Traitor Angel vessel. She tried to imagine the superhuman mayhem and chaos on board. Beings who if before her on the battlefield would be twice her size, brimming with the insatiable desire to kill; who would mindlessly end her in the space of a blink. She clutched the arms of the captain’s throne.
‘Fire.’
The lancet screen flashed retina-scorching white. The Apotheon’s mighty lance, underslung along the length of the defence monitor’s keel, answered the call. A thick beam of pure energy erupted from the Adeptus Ministorum vessel, crossing the vanguard of the colossal fleet like a cannonball across the bow. As Heiss and the bridge crew looked on with wide eyes and hope in their hearts, the beam seared straight through the traitor frigate. Their aim was perfect. The thorax section of the vessel vaporised and, as the sizzling beam of energy flickered and died, both the command decks and swollen engine column of the Adeptus Astartes vessel fell away in different, void-tormented sections.
A cheer exploded across the bridge, and even Heiss found herself on her feet.
‘All right,’ she called. ‘Focus. Mister Randt, have the lance charged for a second target.’
Heiss felt the Apotheon follow the path of the beam, on a collision course for the enemy armada. Her second target was a portly Imperial Guard transport, the traitor vessel decorated with feral world petroglyphs and indigenous art. Her third, a monstrous vessel that appeared a mind-scalding fusion of metal hull and red daemonflesh. The horror-ship took the Apotheon’s fury straight in its bloated abdomen of an engine column. Instead of disintegrating like the Goremongers frigate, or exploding like the traitor transport, the possessed vessel began to ripple, tremble and spume – like a wounded wild animal suffering violent death-throes. When the lance beam punched straight through the mutant-ship, the thing started vomiting globule-clouds of zero-gravity blood. It snatched out with hooks, claws and tentacular appendages, entangling nearby cultships, before tearing them apart in void-drowning fury.
With the Adeptus Ministorum defence monitor plunging down the cemetery world’s ivory curvature and cutting pack leaders in two with its brutal lance, Heiss and her crew were making themselves known to the Cholercaust fleet. Tempted by the prospect of first blood, bastardised raiders and the cannibal crews of piratical marauders surged towards the Apotheon. Heiss pushed the monitor’s feeble engines to their limit. The vessel crossed the blood-thirsty bows of the enemy ships and presented the gaping muzzles of its waiting battery of cannon.
‘Fire as you bear!’ Lieutenant Heiss commanded. At Midshipman Randt’s relaying of the order the starboard battery began a ragged, punishing barrage. Laser blasts thundered down the lengths of Chaos raiders and slaughtermen. Light and fire blazed its way through the oncoming vessels, torching warrior-cramped compartments from their prows to their sterns. ‘Give the order to fire at will,’ Heiss told Randt as the Apotheon completed its first broadside. The bridge crew watched a myriad of vandalised brigs, gunships and cutters punch through the debris field of spearhead derelicts and wreckage. Streaking out from them were a swarm of smaller vessels still – hump shuttles, fortified life-rafts, launches and assault boats, all packed with homicidal thugs, honed blades and hull-cutting equipment.
‘Lieutenant…’
‘Give Padre Gnarls and the boatswain the order, prepare to repel boarders,’ Heiss said tightly.
‘Lieutenant!’ Randt shouted. Heiss saw it. A Khornate cultship. A heavy transport – wall-to-wall with the Blood God’s murderous acolytes – passing across their own Voss prow section. It was all happening so fast. The lance. The continuous, crashing gunfire of the battery. The impending boarding action. The armada without end, Chaos vessels passing behind and about the lone defence monitor. The ships would be on an unswerving course for Certus-Minor –
where from low orbit the Cholercaust fleet would launch an apocalyptic landing, its Thunderhawks, drop-ships, pods, lighters, barges, carriers, haulage skiffs and junkers numerous enough to black out the stars. From this nightmare ramshackle of craft a vast army of insane blood-crusaders would spill. Cultists, Chaotics, daemons and Traitor Angels. Uncountable. Unstoppable.
The lieutenant’s lip curled. ‘Are we at ramming speed?’
The young Randt looked at her grimly.
‘Almost, lieutenant.’
‘I want to hit her amidships, do you understand, Mister Randt?’ Heiss said. The midshipman nodded. Heiss stared at the fat transport towards which they were streaking with the queasy certainty of a torpedo. Heiss licked her lips. ‘I want to break her back…’
Chapter Seventeen
Unto Dust
The shovel bit into the cemetery world grit. Woodes Sprenger had been a grave fosser his whole life. Under his sweat-soaked shirt and dust-coat he was tough and lean; he handled his spade with speed and a working man’s determination. Tossing earth up out of the grave with hypnotic rhythm, the fosser’s blade finally hit metal. Scraping off the rusty surface of the stasis casket, Woodes kicked footholds into the side of the grave and used the tip of the shovel to prise open the coffin.
The stench of stale death rose to meet the Certusian. He coughed and covered his mouth. Reaching up for his gas-lamp by the graveside, Woodes brought it down to explore the coffin’s contents. This was borderline sacrilege for the grave fosser, whose job – like thousands of others – was to bury the dead sent to reside in the sacred cemetery world earth and dig up caskets whose tenure had expired to make way for further cadaver arrivals. Only the wealthy and advantaged could afford a plot on Certus-Minor. They were buried, the stasis-field generators on their sarcophagi deactivated and removed, and the dead allowed to rot in peace – as cemetery world custom dictated. Common fossers never went into the coffins – only grave robbers ever did. In this way, breaking the seals and prising open the casket went against every fibre of Woodes’s spiritual being, and he would not have been doing so – even given the dire circumstances on Certus-Minor – unless the pontifex himself and the Emperor’s Angels had given the order.
Inside the casket Woodes found the remains of a woman. A desiccated skeleton buried in the copious material of an extravagant grave gown. Woodes expected that she was spire nobility from some distant hive-world. The bones of her fingers were adorned with the precious metal and stone of rings, and the vertebrae of her neck were a tangled nest of priceless jewellery. The empty sockets of her skull leered up at the grave fosser and Woodes coughed again. Leaning in close, Woodes checked the system of wires running down the depth of the grave between the sculpted tombstone and the casket. Pulling the wire cord, Woodes set off the mournful peal of the bell positioned in the decorative detail of the marker.
Against the tombstone Woodes saw his weapon, the autorifle he’d been issued – with the scuff-scratched stock, crescent clips and long barrel shroud. The noisy weapon that had saved his life and those of others during the first battlement assaults. With Donalbain he’d held his ground, despite wanting to run from the terror and madness with his fellow fossers and Certusians.
Climbing out of the grave in a well-practised motion, Woodes picked up a small stone from the surrounding soil and posted it through the mouth of a cherubim crafted in the stone. He heard the tinny clatter of the stone as it fell down through the metal pipe connecting the tombstone to the casket and providing it with an air source.
Checking such safety mechanisms was usually the verger’s duty. Personally, Woodes had only been present at one premature exhumation. It had been in the Asphodel-East field close to where Woodes had lived. He had been summoned from his shack by Father Deodat, a passing preacher who had heard a bell from the lychway. Father Deodat, Woodes, Donalbain and several other fossers from the cenopost searched for the marker and sent for shovels before proceeding to dig up the grave on the preacher’s orders. The bell rang incessantly, and within the casket the cemetery worlders found an Imperial Guard officer – a dragoon in full dress uniform – who had been buried with his plumed helmet and gleaming sabre. The officer had been confused, claustrophobic and out of his mind with fear. In the darkness of the sarcophagus his frantic fingers had found the wire cord, and after an experimental pull had produced the chime of the bell, the Guardsman had proceeded to ring it in the hope that someone would discover him.
Woodes never saw the Imperial Guard officer again. Father Deodat informed the fosser, however, that the officer had told him that he’d been part of an eradication force sent to the jungle world of Yasargil to exterminate the k’nib infestation there. The last thing the officer recalled was being stung by a hanging creeper and reporting to the camp infirmary. Deodat hypothesised that his subsequent paralysis was taken for death, and that the colonel’s body had been stasis-shipped from Yasargil to Pyra and from his home world to Certus-Minor. As the alien toxin wore off, the dragoon found himself confronted with the horror of being buried alive.
Nearby, Woodes heard the spade of his brother-in-law Donalbain crunch through the earth. Shovelfuls of dirt flew up out of a grave and landed in a neat pile next to the crisply cut hole. Donalbain was a fosser like Woodes and lived in the same cenopost hamlet.
‘This is insane…’ Woodes said to himself. He looked about him in the darkness. Nearby, cemetery worlders were dragging carts bearing barrels of promethium through the mounds of bodies that surrounded the city perimeter like a hillock or new battlement. The miserable teams pulled their carts through the corpse-piles of daemon insanity, pumping plungers and spraying the fallen nightmares with precious fuel.
‘It’s what the pontifex ordered,’ Donalbain said. Woodes hadn’t noticed the silence of the fosser’s shovel. Donalbain was taller than his brother-in-law and portlier around the belly; he’d worked up a significant sweat digging the grave so quickly. The Certusian noticed an Excoriators Space Marine stood upon the perimeter battlement, Obsequa City reaching up behind him. The Adeptus Astartes warrior watched them from the continuous mountain of rubble, casting his helmeted gaze up and down the line at other cemetery worlders hard at work clearing the dead and warped flesh of immaterial entities, and digging up graves. Donalbain shuddered. He had no idea how effective the Space Marine’s enhanced vision was in the darkness or, indeed, how good his hearing was. ‘The Angels ordered it also, so get back to work.’
Woodes thought of the thousands of graves being dug around the battlement perimeter. Graves that were situated where the necroplex met the city limits. Graves that had witnessed the worst of the fighting so far and been hidden beneath the daemon creatures storming the city as heavy gun emplacements and the blessed weapons of the Emperor’s Angels had ripped through them. ‘Insanity,’ he said again.
He watched two figures approach, picking their steps carefully through the gravestones, ichor-soaked earth and mangled bodies of the spawn-monstrosities. The first was his wife, Goody, dressed in her bonnet, shawl and fleece boots. Her face was soot-stained, tight and grim, but in that moment, with the grave at his feet and the shovel in his hand, she had never looked better to him. Goody had her arm around their daughter, Nyzette, and her delicate hand over the young girl’s eyes. She did not want the child to see the horror of the warped bodies through which they trudged. The child clutched a home-made rag doll of Saint Astrid to her. Woodes’s chest ached for the both of them. As they got closer, he walked to them, embracing both in his sinewy arms.
‘Papa!’ Nyzette said as she felt his lips against her forehead. He kissed Goody, holding both her and the child close to him – feeling a fearful passion for his wife that he hadn’t felt for a number of years.
‘Woodes…’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told her. ‘You will be safe and you’ll be together. That’s the important thing.’
‘Papa, stay with us,’ the young girl chided.
�
�I can’t, my little blessing.’
‘No, papa…’
‘You must be strong and stay with your mother. You will hide and be safe, but papa must fight – you know, like he did before, when you and mama stayed with Aunt Merelda up near Great Umberto’s tomb.’
‘Papa!’
‘Peace, child. I will be with him,’ Donalbain said, smiling as he came up behind them. Goody moved from her husband’s embrace to her brother-in-law. The large fosser looked down at her. ‘Where’s your sister?’
‘Merelda’s on her way down with the boys,’ Goody replied before returning to the arms of her husband.
‘Have you got everything?’ Woodes asked her as Donalbain picked up Nyzette.
‘Everything the pontifex instructed us to take,’ Goody replied, taking a sling bag from her shoulder. She pulled a roll of blankets from the bag and as she did caught a glimpse of the open grave behind Woodes, the open coffin and the skeletal woman within. ‘Oh, Holy Throne,’ she exclaimed, clasping her mouth with her hand.
‘Don’t look at it,’ Woodes said, taking one of the blankets and covering the desiccated cadaver.
‘Can’t we remove it?’ Goody said, horrified.
‘Not without arousing suspicion,’ Donalbain said, angling the child’s head away. ‘Besides, disturbing the grave is desecration enough. Removing the body before the end of tenure? That’s sacrilege. The pontifex would not hear of it.’
‘What else have you got there?’
Goody opened the bag to show her husband the meagre rations of food she’d managed to collect and the water satchel she’d filled from one of the city’s holy fountains. She also had a small, pack-powered handlamp and a bunch of black lilies. The flowers grew along the Certusian lakeshores and were used for decorative arrangements during burial ceremonies. Goody aimed to use them to mask the musty grave-stench of the coffin. Woodes caught sight of a small knife. A stiletto shearing-blade, hidden amongst the death-blooms. He caught Goody’s eye and nodded bleakly. If events did not unfold according to plan, with silence from above and provisions spent, the blade would become the most essential of her gathered items.
