Aaron Aaron Dembski-Bowden: Cadian Blood

“Captain?” the driver called.

Thade rose from his seat in the passenger compartment and moved to lean on the driver’s seat from behind. Through the wide vision slit, the soot-blackened marble of Kathur’s largest cathedral district was visible. This was the heart of Solthane, in all its fire-touched majesty.

“What a cesspit,” the driver said. It was Corrun, as always, driving Thade’s command Chimera.

“You’re quite the poet,” said the captain. “Now talk to me.”

“Two minutes, sir. We… Wait, hang on, we’ve got a roadblock.” The compartment shuddered as if kicked by a Titan, generating a roar of complaints from the ten soldiers strapped into their seats in the back. Thade’s mechanical hand snapped vice-tight on the hand rail, keeping his balance.

“Roadblock cleared,” the driver grinned.

“Go around the next one, Corrun,” Thade tried not to imagine what that roadblock had just been. “You said two minutes?”

“Confirmed, sir. Just under two minutes until we come up on where Dead Man’s Hand have withdrawn. These streets are a bitch. Not exactly made for tanks.”

“Pilgrim roads. I hear you.” Thade narrowed his violet eyes and stared out of the vision slit. The limited vista on display raced past in a blur of blackened buildings. “I can’t see a damn thing out there. Any third-class threats so far?”

“Constantly, sir.” Again with the trademark grin. “What do you think that last roadblock was?”

“Delightful. You’re ploughing down plague victims now. What happened to respecting the dead?”

“They’re not exactly respecting us.”

This generated chuckles from the soldiers in the rear.

“Point,” Thade conceded, “but you know where the orders came from. These people were Imperial citizens, Corrun. Pilgrims. Priests.”

“I heard the stories, Cap. They were faithless. ‘Only the faithless will fall to this plague’, isn’t that what we’ve been told a thousand times?”

Thade dropped it. He didn’t want to dredge this up again because he found it hard to argue with his driver tonight. He believed as Corrun did. The faithless had fallen. They deserved this fate. To hell with a mandate for “clean kills at all times” and “preserving the plague-slain to be redeemed in consecrated incineration”.

But Kathur Reclamation protocol stressed respect for the victims of the Curse of Unbelief. The lord general was keen to foster political allies within the Ecclesiarchy by retaking this world as cleanly and carefully as possible. The emphasis on respecting the tainted dead was just one more petty protocol in a long list that Thade hated to think about since he’d made planetfall. Destroying the dead wasn’t enough. They had to be put down with grace, gathered by Guardsmen with a hundred better things to do, and ritually burned in the reactivated funerary cremation facilities.

By the Emperor’s grace, the 88th hadn’t been selected for gathering duties yet. Killing those that refused to die was bad enough.

“Drive,” Thade said. “And don’t argue. Besides, if Enginseer Osiron finds out you’re using my command Chimera to ram gangs of plague victims clogging the road, he’ll have your head. It’s an insult to the machine-spirit.”

Corrun, grinning like he’d won a month’s wages, wrenched the steering wheel to the left. Another three souls in the ruined rags of Kathurite pilgrims met their final end under the churning tracks of the racing troop transport. There was a brief wrenching of gears as something—some part of one of the plague victims—got caught up in the APC’s moving parts.

Thade closed his eyes for a moment. “I never want to hear that again.”

“It was a purr!”

“You’re good, Corrun. But you’re not irreplaceable. It would grieve me to see you shot for disrespect. Play safe this time. By the book, and no hacking off the machine-spirit.”

“Not at all.” The driver licked his lips. “The old girl likes it rough.”

“When I say ‘ramming speed’, then you get to play your game.”

“Understood, sir.”

Thade’s vox-bead pulsed in his ear. The captain tapped the earpiece, activating the fingernail-sized receiver strapped to his throat. As he spoke, it picked up the vibrations from his larynx and filtered out background noise.

“Captain Thade, Cadian 88th.”

“Count the Seven,” someone hissed. Even through the vox distortion, the voice was wet and burbling. “Count the Seven.”

Thade cut the link.

“New orders?” asked Corrun.

“Just vox-ghosts.” Thade turned to the ten soldiers in the back. Each one watched him—quiet, attentive, at the ready. “Janden,” he nodded to his vox-operator. “Change command frequency and share the new wavelength with the other squads. The current one is compromised.”

He saw the question in Janden’s eyes but gave no answer. The vox-officer leaned down to where his bulky backpack was secured by his seat, and made the necessary adjustments to his communication gear.

“Done, sir.”

Thade gripped the handrail running the length of the ceiling, supporting himself against the shakes. “Get me Dead Man’s Hand. Patch Vertain through to my ear-piece.”

“You’re live.”

“Vertain, this is the captain. Acknowledge.” Thade listened to the reply, and narrowed his eyes. “Thirty seconds, Vertain. That’s all.”

He switched to the command channel. “88th, at the ready! Disembark in thirty seconds! The plaza ahead is flooded with plague-slain and Dead Man’s Hand needs extraction. We go in, we kill anything not wearing our colours, and we move on to the monastery. Corrun…”

“Sir?” He was already grinning again.

“Ramming speed.”

The autocannon roared.

“Fall back!” Vertain cried, wrenching his control sticks. His walker reversed, the backwards-jointed legs protesting with a hiss of angry pistons. Solid rounds pinged and clanged from the pod’s sloped armour, while the Sentinel’s underslung cannon replied in a percussive burst of thunderclap after thunderclap.

The plaza had erupted in gunfire a few minutes before. An expanse of concrete inlaid with a mosaic of the saint formed a courtyard between several towering temples. The squadron had been scouting here when the first sniper shots rang out. Within a minute, plague-slain were shambling from the temples, led by cultists wearing ragged remains of Kathurite PDF uniforms. They came in a tide, immediately broken in places as the Sentinels opened up with their autocannons, drowning out the grunts and wails of the dead.

“We are not dying here,” Vertain spoke into his vox-link. “Break formation and fall back.” He never heard an acknowledgement from the others. He could barely hear his own voice over the carnage unfolding around his walker.

The squadron wasn’t going to win a straight-up fight, and they all knew it. They were scouts, and the Sentinels were armed for taking shots at armoured infantry and light tanks. The high-calibre rounds from the walkers’ autocannons were tearing holes in the crowds of plague-slain, but they were next to useless against such a horde.

Greer’s walker staggered, almost thrown from balance as its stabilisers strained to deal with striding over piles of moving corpses. In a move worthy of a medal, Vertain saw the other pilot condense his leg pistons, lowering his cockpit pod for a moment, then spring upwards to clear the mound of writhing dead he’d been standing atop. Greer landed with a thudding clank that shook the ground, turning as he walked backwards and opening fire on the plague-slain again. A swarm of corpses dressed as monks flew apart in a grey-red cloud as three auto-cannon rounds hit home.

“That was beautiful,” said Vertain through clenched teeth as he kept laying down fire.