Aaron Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Cadian Blood

Thade rode his Chimera as he had stood on it before, atop the roof, both bolters drawn. He held the colonel’s weapon in his human hand, clenching his own pistol in his augmetic fist. No sign of the Death Guard—neither the advance elements already on the planet, nor the Herald’s own warriors who had landed hours before. There was still a chance the 88th had made it here first. The Raven Guard had presumably delayed the XIV Legion, but no contact had been established with Valar and his Astartes since they’d first engaged the Herald.

The tanks bumped and jostled as they crashed fallen curse victims. Thade kept his balance, voxing on the general channel.

“88th, deploy as ordered.” As he spoke the words, Thade holstered one of his pistols and crouched, gripping a handrail with one hand, firing with the bolter in the other.

It was as close to perfect as they were ever going to be able to do in the circumstances. With too many tanks and too little room to manoeuvre, the drivers wrenched their vehicles into a near-perfect performance of Opening the Eye. Tracks rumbled, gang-ramps slammed down, and the last surviving platoons of the Cadian 88th disembarked with rifles up and firing.

The horde of plague-slain was rent apart less than a minute after the first Chimera entered the grounds.

The Chimeras were locked and sealed, left parked in their star pattern. The 88th formed up. At the head of the formation, Thade drew both his pistols again.

“Thade to Zailen.”

“Here, sir,” came the vox-reply from the wounded man still aboard the Chimera. “Begin.”

Every vox-bead in the regiment clicked live. Zailen’s voice was strained and distorted, but all the more earnest for those facts as he spoke the Litany of Courage into Janden’s vox-caster.

“…forever in defiance, we stand true to Him on Earth…”

Thade spoke over the continuing litany, using it as a quiet backdrop as he voxed his orders. At the last, as his remaining squads stood to attention, steeling themselves before entering the monastery, Thade spoke again.

“We’ve got one chance to do this right. One chance to make sure every soul that died aboard the lost fleet, every soldier that died in the city today, and every citizen that died in the plague weeks ago… didn’t die in vain.

“One chance.” He let the words hang.

“We’re going into the catacombs. Then deeper, into the foundations. Then, if we can, we’re going deeper still. The XIV Legion killed this world, this holiest of planets, and we failed to make them pay. Something under this monastery has been calling to the Herald. The Herald has answered. He comes now. We have one chance to beat him to the prize he seeks, one chance to kill whatever he’s come to find. You know what we seek: the Heresy-era battleship Aggrieved. You know what we risk: everything and nothing, for all we have left to give is the breath we draw, and the blood in our veins. This is our one last chance to stand together before we die how we knew we always would—in service to Cadia and the God-Emperor.”

“For Home and the Throne!” the soldiers chorused. Zailen’s recital of the Litany of Courage continued, muted but audible, in the background of the general vox channel.

“For Home and the Throne,” Thade echoed. “The Emperor protects. Now move out.”

The monastery was cold and dead, which surprised no one. Yet the silence was still unnerving. Booted footfalls echoed strangely through the cavernous halls, all sound bouncing from the skeletal architecture while stern-faced and disfigured statues of saints, angels and Astartes peered down from their alcoves.

Thade had given the four remaining members of Dead Man’s Hand a choice: remain outside with the tanks or abandon their Sentinels and join the rest of the regiment. To a man, they’d voted to remain in their walkers. Thade had given them a final salute before entering the monastery’s towering double doors. The regiment knew the chances of the Sentinels surviving out there alone were too slim to contemplate. Only the fact every man knew he was marching to almost certain death under the monastery prevented them from seeking to dissuade the walker pilots.

“I’ll let them die how they wish,” Thade had said. “They’ll kill more of the Archenemy’s host if they’re sat in their Sentinels.”

“We need everyone that can still carry a weapon!” Tionenji insisted.

“Four pistols will make no difference,” Thade shook his head. “They stay and die how they wish to die. They stay and fight however they choose. This conversation is over.”

Now the 88th advanced through the ruined cathedral, the occasional gunshot blasting out to silence a stray plague-slain that shambled through the empty halls. Over the vox, Zailen spoke on, now reciting the Litany of Defiance in the Face of the End. His voice grew fainter as time passed.

“The vox-link is getting weaker. And choppy. I can barely hear Zailen,” Darrick said.

Thade nodded. He didn’t have it in him to play along with the lie. Neither did Master Sergeant Jevrian, but he didn’t stay silent on the matter.

“He’s breathing his last, joker. Don’t shine it up for smiles.” The Kasrkin leader tossed aside an empty glass vial, and tensed his hand into a fist a few times. “That’s better.”

“Did you just gland something?” Darrick asked, his irritation rising. Cadian regulation discouraged all use of combat drugs, and Thade was especially hard on those he found indulging. With the temporary boost to reflexes and strength from most combat narcotics, came unreliability and dangerous side-effects. Stimm abuse might be common in other regiments, but it was rare in the Shock.

“Shut your whine-hole.”

“Go to hell, stimm junkie,” Darrick snapped.

“Ban,” Thade turned to him and stopped walking. “Is that frenzon?”

“Like it matters if it is?”

There was a click and the nearby hum of a charged weapon. Jevrian flicked his glance to the left, where Commissar Tionenji was holding his laspistol to Ban’s temple.

“Be a good little soldier and answer the captain, you shaved ape,” Tionenji warned. Thade shared a look with the commissar. He was pleased; this was almost the first thing Tionenji had said in the hours since their confrontation, and the first signs of the atmosphere thawing between them. Still, this was hardly ideal…

“Naw, it’s not frenzon,” Jevrian growled.

“This isn’t some penal legion, and you’re not a Catachan jungle thug who gets to gland combat drugs that are forbidden in the Primer.” Thade was as close to angry as Darrick and the others had ever seen him.

“Is this a Ten-Ninety, sir?” asked the commissar.

“That depends. Is that frenzon, Jevrian?”

“A Ten-Ninety? For glanding stimms? I already said it wasn’t bloody frenzon.”

“So what is it?” Thade asked. “I won’t have that crap in my regiment, Kasrkin. We’re all better than that.”

“Dying with dignity is awfully important to the Cap,” Darrick interjected.

“Shut up, Taan.”

“Shutting up, sir.”

“Listen,” Jevrian said, reaching up to lower Tionenji’s pistol with his brutishly large hand. “It’s not frenzon or satrophine, we clear? Throne in flames, don’t we have a job to do? There’s still a war on, last time I checked. It’s just a cocktail of “slaught with a little downer to stay sharp. Reflex juice.”

The captain let it slide. As the command team moved on, Jevrian walked next to Thade.

“That was some fine loyalty you showed me there, hero. Next time the Garadeshi has his gun pointed at your face, I might not leap to your defence.”

“Get over it,” Thade said. “You were in the wrong then, too.”

“I’ll remember that.” Jevrian fell back into line with his Kasrkin. “I’ll remember that, captain.”