Aaron Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Cadian Blood

The corpse began to rise again, ponderously clambering to its feet despite being gutted and missing an arm.

Thade’s blade silenced as he killed the power. He’d been fighting with the weapon for almost half an hour, and his muscles burned with effort. Exhausted to his core, he pulled his bolt pistol and pressed the muzzle against the woman’s broken skull. The air within the monastery was cold, but he blinked stinging sweat from his eyes.

“In the name of the Emperor, just die.”

The bolt shell hammered into the corpse’s head and exploded within the brain, wetting the Imperial Guard captain with more chunks of decaying matter. A flying shard of skull hit his breastplate with enough force to leave a scratch.

The sharp cracks of a las-fire chorus died down around him, and Thade’s command squad dispersed around the barely-decorated contemplation chamber. Each of the nine fighters scattered, but stayed in eye contact with at least one other member of the squad. Every man wore dark grey fatigues and black chest armour made filthy from the day’s fighting.

“I need vox,” Thade called out across the cavernous sermon chamber. Janden moved over to him, jogging around the dip in the floor where a mosaic of the Emperor had been defiled some weeks ago. The room reeked of urine and the vast amounts of animal blood used to deface the image.

Janden handed Thade the speech horn connected to the bulky vox-scanner on his back.

“You’re live, captain.”

“Squad Venator to Alliance. Acknowledge signal and give me a situation report.”

The pause of several seconds put Thade’s nerves on edge. There were a million ways this mission could go wrong. Even with the greatest trust in his men, he hated his squads scattered in this hive of the dead.

“Alliance here, captain. Situation: Unbroken. We’re close to the chorus chambers atop the northeastern bell tower. We need ten, fifteen more minutes to get in place.”

“Acknowledged,” Thade replied, and nodded to Janden. “Squad Venator to Fortitude and Adamant . Report.”

The pause this time lasted longer. Janden shook his head at the captain’s glance; it wasn’t interference. For once.

“ Adamant here, captain. Situation: Unbroken. We’re entering the undercroft now.”

“This is Fortitude, Unbroken. Moving with Adamant to support. Heavy resistance in the cellars delayed us. We found where the Remnant were regrouping, and they’re not regrouping anymore, sir. Forty minutes to mission objective.”

“Understood. Be careful,” Thade said.

And so it went. Squad Phalanx next, then Endurance and Defiance, on and on down the line. The captain listened to the brief situation reports from each of his fifteen squads. Casualties were light, despite the fighting being fierce.

Thade led his one hundred men in a loose scattering of squads, moving to take control of the primary altar chambers at the heart of the monastery. Another hundred followed First Lieutenant Horlarn to secure the undercroft and purge the subterranean tombs of the enemy. Second Lieutenant Darrick led the last hundred, securing the four bell towers thrusting up from the monastery’s central domes. The holy building was the size of a small town - the 88th had spent the best part of three hours cutting right to the core of it.

One last vox-report to make. The most important one.

“This is Captain Thade. 88th reports progress as expected. Resistance medium-to-heavy. No sign of primary targets, repeat: zero sightings on primary threat. Resistance so far, secondary threats twenty per cent, tertiary threats eighty per cent.”

This simple message was all that was required. He doubted it even reached the lord general’s base, but it still had to be done.

Janden took the speech horn when Thade handed it back. “Only twenty per cent on the secondary threat? Felt like more.”

Thade smiled at the vox-officer with the bandaged arm. “I’ll bet it did.”

At his order, the squad moved out, heading deeper into the monastery. The chambers grew larger, expanding into halls, each one majestic in size and increasingly grand in ostentation, built by faithful hands many thousands of years ago. Arched walls and ceilings were supported by great spines of stone, thickly jutting from the skeletal architecture. Stylised pillars rose to the roof, each one bathed in the weak dusk light coming through the shattered stained glass windows.

The ten soldiers in Thade’s squad fanned out, stalking through the near-darkness in a familiar ritual of stops and starts. Run to a pillar. Crouch, rifle up to scan ahead. Run to the next pillar…

Something cried out ahead. It was either inhuman, or hadn’t been alive in weeks. Thade looked around the pillar he was kneeling behind, one hand on the faded red carpet for balance. He saw nothing, but heard the moan again.

A few dozen metres ahead of him, the sight blocked by the pillars, a lasgun fired with a single, sharp crack. “Contact!” someone called out. “Tertiary threat confirmed.”

The Cadians advanced, rifles up and no need to hide. A small group of plague victims, no more than twenty, spilled sluggishly from an arch behind a torn red curtain.

Thade squeezed off a shot with his pistol, detonating the head of the lead curse victim.

“Kill them!” he shouted, and nine lasguns lit the chamber with flickering red flashes of pinpoint laser fire. Not a single shot missed, but the disease-wracked corpses still took several direct hits to put down for good.

The soldiers stood around the bodies after the killing was done. It was Kathur Reclamation protocol to speak short prayers for each of the fallen when time allowed. Captain Thade ordered his men on without a word. Time was not on their side.

The squad moved through a series of smaller chambers, each one a mosaic-rich tribute to Saint Kathur’s deeds, paid for by hundreds of generations of pilgrims. Progress was fast until the squad’s eleventh man, wheezing as he leaned upon an aquila-topped black staff, rasped the captain’s name.

Thade halted. “Make this good, Seth.”

“I hear someone calling. Crying out, as if from a great distance.” The sanctioned psyker wiped a fleck of foamy spittle from his lips with a trembling hand. His powers were erratic at the best of times, waxing and waning without his control. This campaign was a nightmare—Kathur was wreathed thick in warp disruption, and the psychic toll on the Imperial Guard’s telepaths was immense. Five had died of embolisms in the weeks since planetfall, one of heart rupture, and a further two had fallen under possession by nameless horrors born of the warp.

“Calling out to us?” Thade asked.

“I… I cannot tell. There is something ahead.” Here Seth paused to suck air through his teeth. “Something powerful. Something old.”

“Primary threat?” asked Janden. This was greeted by a short wave of chuckles from the gathered soldiers and Thade shaking his head. “Not likely,” he said.

The captain resisted the urge to sneer at the wheezing, thin-limbed psyker. Their eyes met and the gaze held for several moments. The captain’s eyes were the typical pale violet of the Cadian-born, while Seth’s were a deep blue, bloodshot under the band of metal across his brow that sank cables into his brain to amplify his unreliable talents. “Anything more specific?” Thade tried to keep the dislike out of his voice and his expression. He was almost successful.

“An agent of the Archenemy.”

“In the next chamber?”

“In one of the chambers ahead. I cannot be sure. The warp clouds everything.”

Thade nodded, inclining his head and leading the squad on. “Janden, what chambers are ahead?”

The vox-officer consulted his data-slate, tapping a few buttons. “A series of purification halls. Pilgrims used them to bathe before being allowed entrance to the inner temple.”