Sabbat War Page 9

  ‘What’s a lekt choir?’ said Hansen, turning his rifle back to the shutter.

  Duraki shrugged. ‘I think they’re like astropaths or maybe battle psykers?’ he said. ‘I don’t know exactly.’

  ‘And their heads… exploded?’ said Vaslov.

  ‘Yeah. Every one of them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Sek’s dead, Vas. Sek’s dead.’

  The words hit them like a hammer blow, though they must have known something huge had happened. Even over the sounds of fighting coming from beyond the shutter, they couldn’t have missed the absence of the Anarch’s voice.

  Taliam looked up from her vox-caster.

  Only now did Duraki see she was holding the vox-caster’s cracked headpiece to her ear.

  ‘You got it working?’ he said.

  She nodded, holding up a hand for silence.

  ‘She got it working?’ he said, turning back to the others.

  ‘Kind of,’ said Vaslov. ‘There’s signals. Ship to ship. Constant bearing, decreasing range.’

  ‘Whose ships?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ snapped Taliam, toggling switches and adjusting dials on the side of the battered device. ‘But it’d be a lot easier if you’d all shut up and let me work. All I know is the signals are Imperial and they must be really close for a field-caster to hear them.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure Sek’s dead?’ said Shanno, moving his gleaming laspistol from hand to hand. ‘They always said he was immortal.’

  Duraki moved to his bedroll to retrieve his own lasgun and said, ‘Well, I guess he wasn’t as immortal as they said. Something’s happened on Urdesh. Someone got to him.’

  He looked over to Kezra’s bedroll. The woman had her back to him, scratching furiously on the wall with a tiny screwbolt held tight in her bleeding fingertips. The manic jerks of her head and hand put Duraki in mind of the doomed lekts on the bridge.

  ‘Kezra, what’re you doing?’

  She turned her head as if she hadn’t known he was there.

  ‘The pale face of death. Swords of three.’

  The wall in front of her was scratched with a repeating pattern, crude representations of what looked like skulls, each surrounded by a triangular pattern of swords. It was like something you might see on a flag or embossed on armour. Duraki didn’t know what it was, but was struck with the certainty that it held some greater meaning.

  ‘Anyone know what this is?’ he said. ‘This thing Kezra keeps drawing.’

  ‘Balhaut, when the Gate Fell,’ said Vaslov.

  ‘What’s that now?’

  ‘It’s a painting,’ said Vaslov. ‘By Van Stook, one of the true old masters of Sabbatine art.’

  ‘Thanks for the art history lesson, but what’s that got to do with anything?’

  Vaslov shook his head. ‘It’s a painting that depicts a famous Militarum victory on Balhaut. Big heroic stuff, you know? Glorious Guardsmen fighting Blood Pact, some fancy officer in the middle of it all, but he’s standing next to an Astartes warrior in purple armour. That symbol is on his shoulder guard.’

  Vaslov tapped his lasgun barrel on the skull bounded by the triangular pattern of swords.

  ‘It’s the symbol of the Silver Guard.’

  Kezra dropped the bolt she was using and put her head in her hands.

  ‘They’re coming!’ she whispered, looking up at the ceiling. ‘They’re coming now…’

  Duraki put a hand on Kezra’s shoulder and said, ‘Thank you.’

  She flinched and said, ‘For what?’

  ‘For reminding me,’ he said, rising and marching back towards the shutter.

  ‘Wait, what are you doing?’ said Knox, blocking his path. ‘You’re not planning on going back out there?’

  ‘I am,’ said Duraki. ‘We all are.’

  ‘What?’ said Vaslov. ‘No, that’s lunacy! We’ll die out there.’

  ‘What do you think’s going to happen when the Space Marines get here? We get to go home for sacra and medals?’

  Vaslov’s eyes were filled with fear. ‘You’re going out because of a symbol scratched on a wall? Kezra’s crazy, you know that.’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ said Duraki.

  Hansen nodded at Vaslov and said, ‘Vas is right. We can’t go out there. If the packsons don’t kill us, the Space Marines will.’

  Knox moved to stand before Duraki and said, ‘If we go out there, who are we killing? Who are we fighting for?’

  ‘You know who we’re fighting for.’

  ‘I want you to say it. Say it out loud, so we can all hear it.’

  Duraki’s heart hammered in his chest, and the roaring in his ears sounded like thunder. He’d always thought it was the echoes of the Anarch, he whose voice drowns out all others.

  But that wasn’t right, not any more.

  The Anarch, whose voice is heard no more.

  It was the Emperor. It was always the Emperor.

  Duraki scanned the faces surrounding him. He knew them as well as any he’d known in his days as a Guardsman. They’d been bonded by shared guilt, by broken chains of loyalty to a shared ideal that had been forged into something new and terrible.

  But something broken could never be forged into something stronger.

  ‘We’re only alive because we were weak,’ he said, years of hiding from the truth finally catching up to him. ‘Emperor forgive us, but we pledged to our sworn enemy. We told ourselves so many lies over the years as to why we did that. Some of us did it because we just didn’t want to die. I convinced myself I could tell them what they needed to hear and still be loyal in here.’

  Duraki thumped his fist to his chest, where his heart was.

  ‘I told myself that I could do more good alive than dead, that I could sabotage the workings of the Archenemy from within. I told myself that if I could do one thing, just one thing, to discomfit the enemy from within then it was worth me staying alive.

  ‘But that was a cowardly lie,’ he continued, tears flowing down his face and cutting pale lines through the blood coating his cheeks. ‘Decades of war wears a person down, strips away everything superficial about them. It exposes who they really are. And the thing I’ve learned is that if the core is already strong, then it becomes stronger, it toughens up. That kind of soldier can take anything and they won’t break. But if the core’s rotten, like a worm-ridden fruit, the endless grind of war will destroy them, crush them and abandon them to the slow rot of fear. And that sort of person will go to any lengths, will say and do anything, to save their life. The man we killed below the waterline… he was strong, but us? We’re weak.’

  He paused as a groaning rumble sounded through the Vociferator’s superstructure, the stresses of hard manoeuvring. Seconds later came the dull, booming clangs of impacts transferred from the hull and into the ship’s bones.

  Kezra looked back to her carved wall and said, ‘Swords of three, they’re here. Swords of three, the vengeancers come to cut, cut, cut!’

  Beyond the shutter, screeching alarms and war-horns brayed, filling the Vociferator with a thousand screaming voices. Packsons making ready for war.

  Duraki swallowed his fear and said, ‘The things I’ve done since my capture, the things we’ve all done? We can’t undo them, we can’t forget them and we sure as hell can’t hide from what we’ve done just to stay alive.’

  He hefted his lasgun, and thumbed his rifle onto full-auto.

  ‘But we can make amends.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ said Vaslov. ‘The seven of us can’t make any difference.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Duraki. ‘In fact, almost certainly not.’

  ‘So why go?’ pleaded Shanno. ‘Why can’t we hunker down and let the Astartes kill the packsons?’

  ‘Because to the Astartes we’re all packsons,’ said Duraki. ‘There’s no going back now. We’re going to die on this ship, so all that matters now is how we die. We go out there and we kill as many of those bastards as we can, because who knows
, maybe we’ll kill just enough to tip the scale.’

  ‘I can’t die like this,’ said Shanno. ‘Killed by our own. It’s too stupid.’

  ‘Listen, the truth of what we did hurts too much, I know. We lied to ourselves over and over again until we came to believe those lies. But the truth is still inside us, waiting for its moment. This is that moment. Now we have to pay our debt to the Emperor, to prove to Him who we really are.’

  ‘And who are we then?’ asked Vaslov, pacing back and forth.

  ‘We’re the thrice-damned Astra-bloody-Militarum,’ said Knox.

  Duraki saw acceptance that the fate they thought they’d outrun had finally caught up to them. Shanno and Hansen wept openly, but he knew they would stand. Knox would back him, no matter what, and Taliam was clever enough to understand the truth of what he said.

  Vaslov too, for all his bluster, would still come.

  Even Kezra stood with them now, her lasgun held across her chest.

  Knox slung his weapon and worked the chains of the shutter, ratcheting it up with powerful, swift movements.

  One by one, they ducked underneath and formed up on Duraki.

  Now that the moment was upon them, he could think of only one thing to say.

  He made the sign of the aquila and said, ‘Only in death does duty end.’

  They set off in the direction of the command bridge, moving as a squad, just as they’d been trained so many years ago on so many different worlds. They moved with grim purpose, their broken chains of loyalty reforged and made stronger than they had ever been before.

  Seven soldiers against a ship full of the Archenemy.

  What difference could they possibly make?

  The words of Shida-kai echoed in Duraki’s thoughts.

  For how is a victory earned but by infinite individual actions?

  +++ ADDENDUM +++

  To: Chapter Master Veegum.

  From: Vengeancer Squad Argentum Primus.

  Clearance: Vermillion 9

  It is reported this day that Archenemy vessel (designation Carrier 30732/GHY) seeking covert system exfiltration via Mandeville Point 77F6 Delta has been destroyed, together with its entire complement of newly raised Sekkite troops en route to spinward warzones.

  Elapsed time between hull breach and vessel destruction was substantially lower than projected.

  Internecine strife within the Archenemy forces facilitated the swiftness of this operation, together with the disabling of the vessel’s core command-and-control functions by persons unknown.

  The Emperor Protects.

  +++ ADDENDUM ENDS +++

  GLORY FLIGHT

  WRITTEN BY ROBERT RATH

  PREFACE

  Some say Rob’s a rookie, just a fresh-faced recruit, new to the reality of war. Not from these chops he isn’t.

  His story is set a few years back, in crusade terms, and like mine and Graham’s, it explores what happens ‘afterwards’. Perhaps that’s an accidental theme of this collection: what happens when the fighting’s over? Consequences, taking stock, the menial and unglamorous tidying up that has to be carried out when the party’s done. We all seem to have been drawn, in very different ways, to aspects of warfare that don’t often get looked at.

  That’s not to say there isn’t fighting in this. It’s a blistering tale, but also a deeply human one. It’s a terrific piece of storytelling, pacy and well judged, and it showcases a stalwart section of the Astra Militarum that doesn’t get featured often enough. I’m talking gunships, folks. Cue the Wagner. Rob Rath is cycling his engines, and he needs a door gunner…

  ‘We don’t take special requests,’ said Flight Officer Dzeck. She had to shout to make herself heard over the artillery and test-cycling of turbofans. ‘Unless it’s on the manifest, we’re not taking it.’

  ‘I have the dispatch orders,’ said the mortuarian. He held them out, the sheets of pulp paper whipping like a cavalry pennant in the engine-wash. The Valkyries of Glory Flight were doing preflight cycles, clearing the dust from the vector-thrust nozzles in their wing tips.

  Herodor was hard on the Valks.

  ‘It’s all proper,’ the mortuarian said, pushing the hem of his blood-spattered plastek robe down as it ballooned in the gale.

  ‘Talk to the wing commander, not me,’ Dzeck said, shaking her head and pointedly not taking the documents. She’d had enough experience with the Munitorum to know that once you touched the paperwork, it became your problem.

  And she did not want this problem.

  Instead it was her mortuary chief, Stavven, who grabbed the sheaf of papers. Damn him. He took them just as they’d begun to tear, smoothing the orders out on the back of his data-slate. ‘He’s right,’ Stavven said, sliding up his helmet visor so Dzeck could look into his obnoxiously kind eyes. ‘It’s flagged from command. Looks like he was a last-minute addition.’

  Dzeck tried to conceal the snarl. She hated how Stavven did that. Calling the cargo he or she, making it personal.

  Stavven wasn’t like the rest of Glory Flight. Unlike the rest of her crews, he hadn’t been drawn for this duty from the 22nd Keyzon Air Assault Group. He wasn’t even Aeronautica, but Ecclesiarchy. A civilian on her kite. One who was flight-certified, but a civilian all the same.

  To Dzeck, this was a mission. But to Stavven it was a mission. Big difference.

  ‘It doesn’t come aboard unless it’s on our manifest,’ she reiterated. ‘It’s physics. We’re fully loaded as is. We don’t have room for that.’

  The sarcophagus was waist high, with a lid thick as the flat of a sword blade. Made from some kind of obsidian, it hovered two inches off the ground on the repulsors of the loader. A mortuary servitor, its spinal rig heavy with needles and embalming phials, stood mutely at the rear, ready to push it aboard.

  ‘It would fit,’ said Stavven, adjusting a knob on his data-slate so a schematic of the cargo bay flickered on the screen. ‘True, the mortis drawers on either side are full, but there’s still the main bay. There’s still room for the…’ He checked the paperwork. ‘…colonel.’

  Dzeck ran her tongue along her bottom row of teeth, scraping up Herodoran dust, and turned to spit, then thought better of it. Two days back, a commissar had paid her a visit to remind her how disrespectful that was. Stavven, she was sure, had prompted that talk.

  So she swallowed the grit and turned to watch the ground crew climbing out of the cockpit of the Ascension of Saint Kzacja. The craft’s freshly resprayed colour scheme – dust blue on top, sky-grey on the underside – still looked strange to her. Paint that had already started to flake in the harsh conditions.

  ‘Everything good?’ she yelled, sticking up a thumb.

  The maintenance crew nodded and flashed a double thumbs-up.

  Emperor-damned Herodor. After a week dirtside, this preflight ritual was getting familiar.

  Before landing, she’d heard that the very dust of this shrine world was sacred, blessed by Saint Sabbat herself. Stavven wore a pouch of it around his skinny neck. So hallowed, in fact, they were supposed to spit in ration cans rather than on the ground.

  If it was sacred, Dzeck thought, it was a sacred nuisance.

  It got in everything. Engineers had to do preflight cycles before each take-off, making sure none of the blue silica dust had been sucked into the turbofans. Get a deposit of it collecting in the wrong place and it could jam a turbine or even strip rotator shafts like an industrial sander. And the particulates were so fine, even the shrouds they’d fixed over the intakes only lasted for a short time during the dust storms.

  She heard Stavven say something indistinct, and wheeled. ‘What?’

  ‘I said,’ he repeated, leaning close and shouting, ‘regulations state that we have to make reasonable accommodation for funeral customs.’

  ‘This’ – she gestured to the enormous coffin – ‘is not reasonable. What does it weigh?’

  ‘Two tonnes.’

  ‘Two tonnes? Two kakking tonnes? Kakk, no.’ She crossed
her arms, annoyance bleeding into anger now. ‘Use ground transport. Let the Munitorum cargo-8s take it.’

  ‘We tried,’ the mortuarian interjected. His eyes darted between the two air crew, nervous. ‘They’re overloaded running supplies between Landing Field Tertius and the front in the Stove Hills. Only military-critical. No bodies.’

  ‘Kajj,’ said Stavven, using her name as if they were friends. ‘You know that as mortuary chief it’s my call.’

  ‘Not when it affects flight integrity,’ she shot back. ‘We’re fully loaded. A two-tonne slab will throw the Valk’s centre of gravity way off.’

  ‘It won’t,’ said Stavven. ‘You’re used to Voss-pattern Valkyries, Kajj. The Ascension is a Spectre assault carrier–’

  ‘I know what I fly.’

  ‘Then you know it can carry two Centaur tow-vehicles,’ Stavven continued, with condescending patience. A ping drew his attention to his data-slate, and he turned it around to show her, shouting as the engines cycled higher. ‘It’s out of our hands anyway – manifest update from the commander. It’s on there.’

  Dzeck stepped away, masking her fury by doing a visual check of the rest of the flight. She saw Malkov stepping off the mounting ladder of their escort, Angelic Mourning. He raised his helmet visor and held his arms up wide as if to say: What gives? Why the kakk aren’t we moving?

  She flashed the hand signal for delayed take-off, and raised two fists, indicating twenty minutes.

  She could see his eye-roll from two landing pads away, and almost smiled as he climbed back into the Angelic’s cockpit to vox an update to flight control.

  ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ said Stavven. ‘It’s what Saint Kzacja would’ve done. After all, was it not she who led the mourning esholi, those who recovered the Beati’s body when Sabbat fell? Those who washed her nine wounds and twined her hair with islumbine? Who escorted it to Hagia with the White Scars, and whose very name graces our noble–’

  ‘You have fifteen minutes to load it, secure it, and get yourself in the cockpit,’ she said.

  Stavven nodded at the mortuarian and signed the form.