Aaron Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Cadian Blood

“A bath house? In a cathedral?” Zailen, the squad’s weapons specialist, walked alongside Janden. The hum of his live plasma gun set the troopers’ teeth on edge. Thade felt his scalp prickling, but fought down the sensation as he spoke.

It was Thade who answered. “Saint Kathur, Emperor rest his bones, was famed for his purity. It makes sense those who came to see his remains would be required to ritually cleanse themselves.”

Zailen shrugged and looked away—a habit of his when he didn’t have the words to answer.

Ahead of them, the great double doors leading into the purification chambers stood closed. Defiled engravings of female angels, carved of marble now stained with blood and body matter, stared down at the eleven men. Thade cleared his throat.

“Trooper Zailen?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Open the doors.”

“Yes, sir.”

Zailen raised his plasma gun and squeezed the first trigger. The baseline hum of the arcane weapon intensified in an angry whine of massing energy. He breathed a quiet “Knock, knock…” and pressed the second trigger.

The plasma gun roared.

Second Lieutenant Taan Darrick was having a bad day.

There were two reasons for this. The first and least important was more of a wearying ache than a real worry—the 88th were mechanised infantry, and by the Emperor did Darrick hate having to walk everywhere. This monastery assault took a lot of foot-slogging, and while his fitness wasn’t an issue it still irritated him that the regiment had been selected for this operation. Reinforce the idiotic Janusians on their vainglorious thrust into enemy territory? The fools had paid for it now. Sit in a damn church and hold out for reinforcements? Ugh. It hardly screamed “mechanised infantry” to Darrick.

The captain, as the captain always did, took the orders without a complaint and made the best of a bad deal. But Darrick? Darrick was a complainer and damn proud of it. He felt it gave him character in the stoic ranks of his fellows. It simply didn’t occur to him that he was just being annoying.

The second reason for his bad day, and much more of a real problem, was the fact he was being shot at. Darrick’s squad had met serious secondary resistance as they neared the top of the massive bell tower. On Kathur, “secondary resistance” meant the enemy had guns, too.

Crouched behind a wooden podium once used by priests to lead choir singers, Darrick reloaded his lasgun, slapping a fresh power cell into the standard-issue weapon with a professional shove. A las-round scorched a black streak through the pulpit a hand’s span from his left ear.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a little heavy support?” he asked the soldier sharing his pathetic cover. The other Cadian grunted agreement as he fired around the podium. He was new to the squad, and found Darrick’s endless banter distracting, not endearing. He was hardly alone in this opinion.

The enemy, ragged elements of the Kathur PDF picking through the bones of the monastery in disorganised packs, had entered the ancient chorus room at the same time as Darrick’s men. A series of these same chorus chambers nestled atop each of the four huge spires rising from the monastery. The towers were crucial, both as a likely haven for Janusian survivors, and as the only decent sites Imperial forces could effect a supply landing for any regiment bottled in here for longer than they should be.

“I’m good with a heavy bolter, you know,” Darrick was opining to his captive audience now, and his squad shared grim smiles. The lieutenant’s declarations were punctuated by enemy fire cracking and pinging off the stone all around him. “And I enjoy it. The kick of actually being able to shoot your damn enemies without all this messing around, being denied any toys in case we mess up the architecture.”

One of his men, Tomarin, grinned at Darrick’s observations. “It’s a shame to be denied one’s passions, sir.”

“That it is. That it is. Now, time to ruin some assholes’ days.”

Darrick’s rifle bucked in his hands with each shot, and each shot was a kill. You didn’t train every day of your life from the age of six and miss too often. The second lieutenant had been firing the same rifle for thirty years, and while most junior officers withdrew more advanced arms from the officers’ arsenal upon achieving promotion, Darrick liked to stick with what he knew best. His one guilty pleasure was his never-ending supply of various grenades—but they were in his storage bag back at the base. Along with heavy bolters and other support weapons of any significance, it was hard to justify taking grenades into a monastery when Kathur Reclamation objectives clearly stated the architecture of the shrineworld was to remain “undamaged by reckless interference”.

Denied his favourite toys, Darrick scowled as he gunned down the unarmoured soldiers of the Planetary Defence Force. When the soldier next to him fell back with hole in his head, Darrick had to concede that some of the Chaos-tainted scum over there were truly wicked shots. He broke cover to crack off three more rounds, killing two PDF soldiers and taking another in the belly. That one would take a while to die, thrashing around on the marble floor and turning his blue uniform red.

Counts as a kill shot, he thought, smirking as he reloaded again.

Darrick tapped the little pearl-like vox-unit in his ear. There was a rat’s chance in the Great Eye he’d be able to make a break for his vox-officer, Tellic, who was pinned down across the room with most of the others in Darrick’s squad. Las-fire flashed through the chamber in lethal strobes.

Range on the micro-bead vox was awful at best, especially when the stone walls played all hell with the signals, but Darrick pressed the throat mic against his skin and trusted his luck.

“Alliance to Venator.”

Nothing. Not even static. Tremendous. Really, just delightful.

Darrick’s luck was dry, and so was his patience. A quick kiss of the aquila necklace he wore, and the lieutenant broke into a crouching sprint away from the altar he’d been hiding behind. Las-fire slashed past close enough to warm his skin, but either the Emperor chose that second to bless him with fortune, or the Chaos-tainted scum who could actually hit anything were busy shooting elsewhere. Whichever was true, Darrick leapt behind the paltry cover of a row of pews, kissed his necklace again, and came up firing on full-auto.

The tower-top choir chamber with its high domed ceiling and rows of pews now played host to a tune far removed from Imperial litanies and hymns. Lasgun cracks formed an incessant chorus to the infrequent percussion of heavy bolters hammering out their high-calibre rage. Explosive shells from these smashed into the white marble walls and detonated, leaving head-sized chunks of stone blasted free. Rubble rained on the Cadians from behind their makeshift cover.

“How come they get to shoot the place up?” groaned one of the Guardsmen to his lieutenant, sharing the pathetic and disintegrating cover.

“Because,” Darrick faked a thoughtful expression, “it’s more fun this way.” Those words spoken, he rose, rifle in hand.

Darrick fired the last shot in his power cell right into the open mouth of a shouting PDF sergeant, and ducked back under cover. With a silent prayer to the Emperor as he tapped his micro-bead, he repeated the words he was getting bloody sick of repeating. “Alliance to Venator.”

“Venator,” Thade said, “acknowledged.”

As he spoke, he fired his bolt pistol into the face of a young plague victim, doubtless a pilgrim or an acolyte of the cathedral. Now faceless, the child collapsed. The captain stamped on its throat to make sure it wasn’t getting back up, wincing as the spine gave way.