by Guy Haley
Aronis City, The Sixth Moon of Paragon VI
2043395.M41
Bannick’s father’s study was warm and comfortable, yet Bannick felt anything but, the fear in his guts as icy as the Long Winter outside; fear that his uncle would refuse his request.
Vardamon Anselm Lo Bannick’s smile became fixed and the conversation stalled. He leaned back a little, firelight catching on the medals upon his chest, glinting off the brass of his artificial eye. For a second, the noise of the ball outside the study intruded between nephew and uncle, shattering the atmosphere of comradeship they had shared until a moment ago. ‘Ah, boy,’ he said eventually. ‘Boy, you have grown so much.’ His eye lingered on the scar across Bannick’s cheek, and his face was curious with unasked questions.
‘You already said that, uncle. Forgive me, but you are avoiding my question.’ Colaron Bannick was nervous. He could not spoil his chance, he needed his uncle’s influence to lift the exemption. He was tired and twitchy, guilt as heavy on him as his need to escape.
Captain Bannick snorted and sank further into the armchair, his head disappearing within its wings. If he noticed the younger Bannick’s discomfort he gave no indication. Colaron had to lean forwards to keep his uncle’s gaze. He looked far older than his father. Vardamon maintained he’d been fighting for over twenty years, although but nine had gone on Paragon, a consequence of shifting through the warp. Transmission back and forth from that otherworldy ocean into realspace was not readily controlled, and time could flow strangely for those who pierced the veil between. Bannick supposed it was possible that, right now, his uncle was both here and elsewhere in the galaxy, waging war for the Emperor. He tried not to think of it, unsure if such thoughts were heretical or not.
‘I ask you again. Please consider my request.’
Vardamon sighed. ‘You are set upon this course of action, then? Been dreaming of throwing your life away on some distant armpit of a world for the greater glory of the Emperor since you were a boy, no doubt. Well my advice to you is, don’t.’ He swirled his glass round in his hand, the vintage gleece within sliding thickly up its sides. He raised it sharply and downed it all, a small fortune’s worth of liquor, then immediately leaned forwards for the decanter and poured himself some more. Outside, the shrill, false laughter of some courtly fool eager to please rose above the hubbub.
‘Uncle, such talk…’
Vardamon held up a brusque hand in interruption. ‘Don’t give me all that “you’re being heretical” nonsense, boy. I’m in my brother’s damned study, in my family home, and I can say what I damn well please!’ He fell quiet. When he spoke again he was quieter, and did not look his nephew in the eye. He stared at the flames in the grate of the room, as if addressing them. ‘I am not saying that the Emperor does not need soldiers, by the Throne he does, but he does not necessarily need you. The Imperium is beset on all sides by things I won’t even begin to describe to you. I’m proud of what I’ve done, but I would not wish for you to do the same.’
‘You have done well from your service.’
‘This?’ he gestured to his shining dress carapace breastplate and the medals upon it. ‘Or this?’ he pointed to the cumbersome augmetic attached to his head. ‘Money? Medals? The hope of some land grant on some freshly conquered backwater?’ Vardamon glared at him accusingly. ‘I could have had all that and more if I’d just stayed at home. I’m the brother of the Auditor of Clan Bannick for Terra’s sake, I could have stayed here and lived the high life. Instead I ran off pursuing idiot dreams of glory!’ He looked at his nephew. There was a cloudiness to his remaining eye. The gleece was making him drunk. ‘Little, dear, Col. I’d not have you think me an old fool nostalgic for home, but believe me, the galaxy doesn’t get much better than Paragon, and most of it is a lot worse. I wouldn’t wish my life on my enemy, let alone my nephew.’
‘How can you say that? They sent you home to recruit a new regiment. You’re a hero.’
‘No,’ his uncle said sadly. ‘A hero is a dead man. And there are plenty of them in the Paragonian 62nd. Why, practically the whole damned bunch of them are heroes now.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Don’t make my mistake, don’t throw away your clan-bought immunity from the draft just because of some fool romantic ideal. Stay here, work the foundry ledgers for your father, then one day, succeed him and prosper. Serve the Emperor that way, as legitimate a way as battle, huh? Huh?’
He leaned forwards, gleece thick on his breath, the lens of his artificial eye glimmering red. Bannick did not answer. His uncle shook his head. ‘Better that than death. Or worse. And believe me, there is worse out there, much worse.’ He shook his head, as if to clear it, and drank deeply of his gleece. ‘No, no. I will not help you renounce your exemption.’
‘But uncle…’
Vardamon closed his eyes and pinched at the bridge of his nose, rubbing round his augmetic. He had become fat and jowly, well-fed, but there was something gaunt about him, as if his skull showed through his skin, grinning in horror at what Captain Bannick had seen, and his face was ruined where the augmetic’s metal met the skin. ‘What would your father say? What of the alliance with Clan Turannigen? Have you thought of that?’
The two of them sat, the warmth of the fire failing to keep the chill of winter entirely out of the room. Vardamon shuddered, whether from the cold or the memory of battle the younger Bannick could not tell.
‘Uncle…’ he began hesitantly. He gulped at his own gleece, it put fire in his belly. He needed it, and his voice firmed. ‘You are right. I want to serve. And I admire you for what you have done.’
Vardamon rolled his eye in exasperation. ‘Have you not been listening to me boy?’
Bannick pressed on. ‘But uncle, it’s not just that, it’s…’ his words caught in his throat.
‘What?’
‘There’s been trouble,’ he admitted. His uncle would not know of it, not yet. Bannick’s father had made sure few had.
His uncle’s eyes narrowed, the iris of his brass eye whirring, his gaze once more falling on Bannick’s scar. ‘What kind of trouble?’
INTERSTITIAL
The conduct of officers, when invited to high table in mixed regimental company, will include the following:
i) The wearing of formal dress, including, but not restricted to, the bearing of dress regulation arms at all times.
ii)The correct use of title, rank and privilege when addressing fellow officers
iii) Imperial Standard high table manners (see appendix forty-six (46).
iv) Hair length, facial decoration, tattoos, marking, jewellery, fetishes, religious insignia and other affectations will be allowed to only those permitted by individual regimental edict.
v) Standard Low Gothic and/ or High Gothic ONLY to be employed at all times.
vi) Excessive intoxication will not be tolerated, on pain of court martial.
vii) Standards of prior ablutions to accord with, or exceed, washroom discipline six (6).
viii) Elimination of waste to be taken strictly in designated areas.
Excerpt from the Officer’s Standard Primer,
Book Four, ‘Manners and Conduct’.
Chapter 12
Kalidar IV, BATTLEGROUP Command Leviathan, Macaree’s Tablelands
3328397.M41
Being invited to a banquet aboard the Command Leviathan Magnificence was a great honour, but Bannick, who’d been born to such affairs, was impatient for its conclusion. His shining breastplate, the exact same kind as his uncle had worn all those months ago, weighed heavily on his front, his white gloves formed a lump where they were tucked into his sash, and he wished he could undo the top button of his high-necked vermillion dress tunic. The Great Room of Magnificence was cool and ventilated with purified air, not a speck of Kalidarian dust marring its precious wood panelling or the crystal tableware of the long table. Despite being stuffed into his dress attire, the
room was the most comfortable one Bannick had been in since his arrival on the planet.
Still, the room was stifling in its own way. Bannick would have preferred to have been in his vest in the stuffy bowels of the Baneblade. Before they’d come, Cortein had remarked that you could never tell which way the cards would fall in the Guard. ‘I’ve seen men executed for leaving their station they way you did,’ he’d said as they’d struggled into their dress uniforms in their tent. ‘And I’ve seen men lauded for far less. In a way, we’re lucky.’
Bannick was clever enough not to remark that Cortein had let him go. He was being tested by his clansman; the Honoured Lieutenant’s acquiescence to his request had been one such test, he realised that now.
He supposed that he had passed it. The destruction of the orks had given command the morale boost it sought, the return of the men Bannick had rescued even more so. Two weeks more of fighting, and the orks had been pushed back from the outlying mine heads of Hive Modulus, drawing the force on the Kostoval Flats out, finally ending the siege at the Urtis complex. The orks had fragmented somewhat, their heavy walker unit broken up, and since then two more of the large war machines had been brought down, although there had been no further sign of the Gargant.
Cause enough to celebrate, it seemed, and Bannick had been ordered to attend the banquet. His medal had been taken from him, polished, and before the feast commenced, formally re-presented by Captain-General Iskhandrian of Atraxia himself, along with a fine sword.
Bannick’s new sword sat uncomfortably at his side, tangling with the legs of his chair every time he was obliged to stand and greet a superior officer, and there were a great many of them. The top brass of every regiment on Kalidar was present in the banqueting hall, the pompous titles of each shouted out by the battlegroup’s most senior sergeant as they entered the room: three Atraxian colonels, their marshall, five Paragonian colonels, Paragonian General Ban Lo Kism Verkerigen, the two commissar-colonels of the Savlar regiments, three other high-ranking politicals, Navy liaisons in flounced silk shirtsleeves and bright blue tunics, two tech-priests who sat there not eating a thing, sipping tall canisters of nutrient substitute, Mastraen the Astropath Prime, his aide, the aide’s cymunculous, Maldon and Logan, the army’s two primaris psykers, a spindly, frog-fingered Navigator in a power-assist harness and an unpronounceable string of names, the High Chaplain Moktarn in his ecclesiastical splendour, on and on, and of course, at the head of the table, Captain-General Iskhandrian of Atraxia, commander of the Imperial Guard on Kalidar. Fifty men, all told. The surroundings were of shameful luxury. Bannick found it hard to credit that they were in the heart of a mobile command fortress, a deadly storm raging outside. Other than that, he thought, it was just like a clan banquet back home, with all present jockeying for position, the room thick with intrigue.
He looked at the faces, all colours, all types, eyes of every shade, bodies of all shapes. Tall, short, squat, slender, augmented, purestrain, modified. Man was infinitely variable, though his nature was not.
He was thankful, at least, that the presentation was over.
Iskhandrian delivered a speech at table, praising late Imperial efforts in driving the orks back, and the Imperial Guard’s presence here in what was deep enemy territory.
‘Three weeks, gentlemen,’ he had said, ‘and Hive Meradon will be back in Imperial hands, and the ork nearly gone from Kalidar.’
His words drew a well-measured amount of applause.
Down the table from where Bannick sat, Cortein held himself still. Eyes keen to court intrigue, Bannick could tell that Cortein did not believe a word of what was said. He himself was too cynical to take the speech at face value, but not sufficiently arrogant to think he knew enough about the war to form his own opinion. He resolved to ask Cortein about his opinion later.
Then came the dinner. Bannick had not seen so much food for two years. Courses came and went, accompanied by a variety of wines, liqueurs, liquors and other fluid intoxicants that boggled the mind. Even in the heart of Helwat City on Paragon he’d not seen such variety.
As the exotic beverages flowed, so did the conversation, all of it fascinating. Bannick made sure to restrict his own stimulant intake. He instead dined on the talk of others, dipped in and out of conversations around the table automatically, another aspect of his privileged upbringing he despised, another trait he’d never divested himself of. At least here, unlike on the battlefield, he did not feel so naïve.
‘The Savlar require a firm hand.’ One of the commissars spoke. He too, Bannick noted, had barely touched a drop of drink. ‘That is why all their high-ranking officers are drawn from the Schola Progenium.’
‘Such as yourself and Damartes there,’ said a Navy man, the medals and pips cluttering his shoulders describing his rank as that of commander. He had an insouciant manner that patently irritated the commissar.
‘Indeed,’ said the commissar. He struggled to crack the casing on his food, a sand-dwelling crustacean native to Kalidar. He failed and waved it impatiently away. ‘Oh, the discipline on the ships of the Navy is well regarded by we of the Commissariat, Commander Spaduski, but the Savlar require something… more exacting, shall we say. Their world is one of sinners, sir, a penal outpost bedevilled by gang-warfare and profanity. What little productivity is wrested from it is done so at the point of a gun. The crime of rape is so prevalent there that it is said that only one in four of every Savlar born on the world knows his father. The world is perpetually shrouded in a toxic miasma, it is a poisonous broil, sir. And it is as only right! For the judgement of the Emperor requires that they who have transgressed be punished. They are thieves, murderers, profaners, heretics, liars and scum, the worst the Imperium has to offer, and Savlar is a fit place for them to suffer their penitence. Yet with the Emperor’s guidance we can turn the most unpromising instrument into a potent weapon.’
‘I wonder,’ said the navy man, taking a long pull at an ornate goblet of rare Zolasian wine. ‘How many generations of suffering are required to expunge the guilt of an ancestor? I rather thought it was the threat of returning to Savlar that encouraged them to fight. However, I am pleased to hear they are so motivated by love for our beneficent Emperor.’
‘This is an under-resourced war, sir,’ countered the commissar. ‘The Savlar fight well when correctly motivated. That is all that matters.’
‘I find faith like that reassuring,’ said another, a broad-shouldered giant. When the man had walked in Bannick had initially taken him to be some kind of priest from a mendicant order, for his appearance was modest and his manner that of an aesthete, and Bannick thought his enormous size another product of man’s endless variety. It had not been until the man had been announced by the sergeant as the Brother Arnegis, Lord Steward to Castellan Thieme of the Black Templars that Bannick realised that the priest was actually one of the enhanced Adeptus Astartes, whose presence on the far side of Kalidar was the source of much rumour among the ranks. His cheeks were sharp, his face long and stern and bored, but his eyes were bright as if he found the whole affair on the Leviathan somewhat amusing. These eyes constantly scanned the room, as if searching for threats, and from time to time he would fix one or another of the men around the table with a piercing, assessing stare. All were targets of his judgement, high and lower ranks alike, and none could hold his gaze. The psykers at the table, especially, seemed to draw his attention.
Bannick watched him from the corner of his eye, not wishing to be subject to his scrutiny. Arnegis ate a great deal, methodically munching his way through four portions of food, but said little. Now, however, he had roused himself to interject. ‘It is, of course, the larger part of our lives in the Chapter, Emperor be praised, but it fills me with great joy that lesser men than the glorious Adeptus Astartes are still true in appropriate veneration of our blessed lord. One sees so little of it sometimes, and the work of the pure increases enormously as heresy multiplies.’
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‘Praise be to that!’ shouted the ecclesiarch down the table. He held high his goblet. The Lord Steward inclined his head in acknowledgment.
‘It is a burden the Black Templars gladly bear.’
‘And you, lieutenant?’ said an adjutant Bannick did not know. ‘I understand Paragon is a jewel of a world, some have it that the people there are soft, yet you men fight well, no need to toughen you up, Kalidar seems to be doing an admirable job there.’ He attempted a laugh. No one joined him.
‘The conditions here are no suitable topic for levity,’ grumbled a sour-looking captain three seats up, and the adjutant coloured. ‘I have a score of men dead a day from the dustlung alone.’
‘We fight well,’ said Bannick. ‘But I hold the Savlar in great respect. Throne knows what they faced in order to plant that bomb, but they did, and detonated it to the minute.’
Commander Spaduski nodded as he cracked his sand-mite open and swallowed down its meagre flesh. He made a face. Bannick had eaten his with a blank face, it tasted vile, but he had better manners – or perhaps more sense – than the spacefarer. ‘A fair point. Our commissar colleague has a point, I will concede. This is an under-resourced war. Other conquests are drawing resources away from every conflict in this segmentum and half the Segmentum Pacificus.’
‘There’s a force out in the western reaches now,’ said Spaduski, ‘waging war on places that have never seen the light of the Emperor – a hundred worlds they’ve conquered, but at what cost? Two-thirds of the Pacificus fleet is with them, hundreds of regiments, five Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, and every money-grabbing member of the Rogue Trader houses that can scrape together a following trailing in their wake.’
‘A mighty army,’ said the commissar, ‘bringing light to the dark!’
‘Aye,’ said Spaduski. ‘But how many worlds like this do we stand to lose to pay for their illumination?’ He gestured down the table with the cartiligenous shell of the sand-mite. ‘Look at Iskhandrian there, hollow-eyed from all his work, he’s a good commander from all I hear, but this is a hard war, and he is too dogmatic. They are not normal orks, these Blood Axes, they withdraw and plot as surely as any human foe.’
