Aaron Aaron Dembski-Bowden: Cadian Blood

“I look forward to my promotion,” crackled Greer.

Vertain joined his fire arc to Greer’s, and felt his Sentinel’s gait start to drag. He was limping now, limping badly.

“You’ve got three of them on your right leg, sir,” Greer crackled. “Kick them free.”

Vertain tried. His Sentinel replied by lurching violently to the right with a screech of protesting stabilisers. Alarms flashed across his console as his leg pistons vented air pressure.

“They’ve ruined my stabilisers. I’m not kicking anything for a while.” As he spoke, Vertain’s cockpit tilted again. His helmeted head smacked against the side of his pod, the pain painting his vision in a palette of greys.

The dead were climbing his walker now. He heard their fists beating on the armour plating on his cockpit. They might even drag him down if enough of them could scramble up.

His vox sparked live with a burst of static. “Vertain, this is the captain.” Emperor’s blood, Thade’s voice was clear. He sounded close. “Acknowledge.”

With sick on his breath and half-blind through a concussion, Vertain reported the situation, ending with the four words Captain Thade had been praying not to hear.

“Dead Man’s Hand: Broken.”

“Thirty seconds, Vertain. That’s all.”

It turned out to be just under twenty seconds.

The Chimeras tore into the plaza, a rolling thunderhead that slammed into the horde of wailing dead. Black as a panther, the command Chimera pounded into the first group, grinding them into bloody gobbets. It swerved to a halt, cutting down the plague-slain nearby with angry beams of light from its multilaser turret. The irritated whine of high-energy las-fire shrilled above the moans and crunches of combat.

The other Chimeras, their hulls a gun-metal grey, followed in the wake of destruction. Dozer blades bolted to the front of the troop transports—specifically banned from ungentle use in clearing roads of corpses - now hammered the plague-slain to the ground to be crushed under heavy treads.

The drivers spread out to form a protective ring around the embattled walkers, turret fire slicing through the bodies of anyone approaching the tanks. In a chorus of clangs, thirty rear ramps slammed down onto the mosaic ground, and the 88th spilled from their transports: guns up and firing red flashes. Thade was first out of his Chimera, chainsword raised and howling.

“Secure the walkers! For the Emperor!”

The captain’s first foe wasn’t dead. A PDF traitor ran at him, slowed by the disease ravaging his body. In his fist was a broken bayonet. Thade’s chainsword sang in a savage backhand swing, and the traitor’s head left his shoulders.

“First blood to Cadia!” someone shouted to his left.

The fight lasted less than two minutes. Lasguns cracked out head-shots in orderly volleys, scything down the enemy in waves. The Cadians stayed shoulder to shoulder in their squads, taking no casualties in the brief battle. When the last of the plague-slain was dragged from the leg of Vertain’s walker and shot in the back of the head, Thade holstered his pistol. The sergeants from all fifteen squads ringed him, every man standing ankle-deep in the dead. The stench rising around was enough for several men to don their rebreather masks.

“88th: status.”

“Unbroken,” fifteen squad leaders chorused.

“Unbroken,” Vertain sat in his cockpit, the door opened so he could speak freely. He made the sign of the aquila. “Close call, though.”

Thade nodded. “We move to retake the Shrine of the Emperor’s Unending Majesty. We’re hearing nothing from the Janus 6th in there, and if they have any survivors left, they’re almost certainly retreating deeper into the monastery.” Every eye turned to the building a kilometre away through the winding streets. Half of it still burned. “We’re going in—securing it where the Janusians failed—and waiting to be reinforced. If the resistance is beyond our capabilities, then we get comfortable and ask Reclamation command what they want us to do. Questions?”

“Primary threats?” asked one of the sergeants.

“Potentially. Nothing solid yet. If we find them, we take them down. If there are too many, we consolidate and await reinforcement. Vertain, report.”

The Sentinel pilot cleared his throat. “We pulled back to this plaza when the fighting in the temple grounds abated. We were looking for a staging ground, sir. The last we saw at the monastery, the enemy’s rearguard was following the forward elements in. The main doors were breached. Six, maybe seven hundred Remnant,” he said, referring to Kathurite PDF traitors. “Double the number of plague-slain.”

“Seven hundred secondary-class threats, and fifteen hundred third-class,” the captain confirmed. “Nothing changes. We split into three forces, each with specific objectives. I’ll take one hundred men to the central chambers. Lieutenant Horlarn, you take a hundred to the undercroft and make sure there’s no way into the shrine from underground. Lieutenant Darrick, you’ve got the bell towers. Questions?”

No one spoke.

“The Emperor protects,” said Thade. “Now move.”

Resistance was nowhere to be seen. Gaining access to the monastery proved to be uncomfortably easy.

The towering gates were broken, torn from their hinges, and there was little sign of enemy forces outside of a few shambling loners wandering around the expansive courtyard. These ended their pathetic existences under precision las-fire, as the Guardsmen filed from their Chimeras and moved in squads up the wide marble stairway to the front entrance. The air reeked of the dead and the burning sections of the monastery itself, a potent musk that again inspired a lot of rebreather use.

Minutes became hours. Deep within the labyrinthine monastery, the Shrine of the Emperor’s Unending Majesty, almost three hundred soldiers of the Cadian 88th were on the hunt. Bodies of plague victims littered the stone floor, just as they did in each passage and chamber the Cadians had passed through in the last few hours. The Janusians hadn’t just been besieged; they’d been infiltrated and annihilated. Bodies of the regiment, blood soaking their urban camouflage gear, were strewn everywhere in the monastery alongside the enemy dead.

Their last stand had been inglorious and, to Cadian eyes, rather unimpressive. The Janus 6th was scattered in a poor defensive spread across the monastery’s series of awe-inspiring sermon chambers, their final resting places showing to the trained glances of the 88th just which soldiers had died fighting, and which ones had broken ranks to seek an escape.

No sign of primary threats so far. In fact, Thade and his officers had just about abandoned the notion of seeing any first-class targets. They had real problems now—enough tertiary threats to last a lifetime. The plague-slain were everywhere inside the monastery, and in far greater numbers than those seen by Dead Man’s Hand outside.

Room by room, the Guardsmen cleansed the holy site, cutting down the shrieking dead as they staggered in feral mindlessness, nothing but shells of unfocused malice.

Poisonous blood showered Captain Thade as he impaled a howling woman with a thrust of his chainsword. A hundred whirring teeth sawed through fleshy resistance, and the woman cried blasphemies as she was disembowelled.

It was hard to tell the dead ones from those that still lived. Neither would lie down and die when you wanted them to, and they all made the same noises.

Thade yanked hard, freeing the blade from her torso in a light spray of near-black blood and fragments of flesh that smelled beyond foul. The rot taking hold of the enemy made such work all the easier. Decay softened the flesh, making it weak under Imperial las-fire and vulnerable to the howling bite of chainswords.