Rob Sanders - Legion of the Damned

The sergeant was suddenly beside him, his boot on the witch’s ribcage and his hellpistol pointed at what was left of her head. The storm trooper put three more blasts into the creature before he was satisfied.

‘Freaks,’ the sergeant spat. ‘Can’t stand them, sir.’

‘She was no doubt possessed by some residual evil she found amongst the bodies,’ Quast announced, trying to re-establish some kind of authority over the situation, even if it was only intellectual. He found himself looking down on the jumbled cadavers: the hellspawn, Traitor Guardsmen and degenerate World Eaters.

‘How are you, sir?’

‘Better now, sergeant,’ Quast managed.

‘Approbator, perhaps we should–’

‘Continue,’ Quast interjected. ‘Perhaps, sergeant, we should continue.’ He holstered his laspistol and nodded at the ordo Valkyrie. ‘Bring me another.’

The sergeant hesitated, before nodding. ‘As you wish, approbator,’ he said, before marching off towards the Valkyrie transport. He left Quast alone with the dead and his thoughts.

‘The question…’ Quast began again, activating the meme-vox and wiping blood from his cheeks with a silk scarf,‘ …is not what ended this world. The Cholercaust clearly did that. The question is, what ended the Cholercaust?’

Inquisitorial records often identified the Blood God’s favoured operating in wretched warbands roaming the galaxy. Greater concentrations were rare, since the xiith Legion’s primordial hate seemed to extend to brother-slayers as well as the innocents of the Imperium. The Cholercaust had been different, however. The planetary populations upon whom it descended were always slaughtered to the last man, woman and child. Failed Adeptus Astartes interventions and Imperial Navy gauntlets had confirmed large numbers of ancient World Eaters vessels in the screaming cultist armada, which seemed to grow with every conquest. Some of those frigates and cruisers identified hadn’t been seen since the Horus Heresy, thousands of years before.

Little was known about the champion that led the Blood Crusade, the maniac who had managed the impossible and gathered so many of his murderous brothers to one cause and objective. He was known only as ‘the Pilgrim’ and led his vast host with religious conviction, following the strange path of a blood-red comet. Celestial cartographers believed it to be the Keeler Comet, a long-period body with a highly eccentric orbit, recorded to have passed through both Segmentum Obscurus and Segmentum Solar nearly ten thousand years before. Euphrati Keeler, the remembrancer of great antiquity, immortalised the comet over El’Phanor in The Ancient Traveller , a pict rumoured to hang in the Imperial Palace and reproduced across the Imperium. The comet had found the galaxy much-changed upon its most recent return. The xenos empire of the eldar had fallen, the Imperium had been shattered by civil war and the colossal warp storm known as the Eye of Terror had erupted in its path.

As the Keeler Comet blasted out of the immateriality of the Eye, it became apparent that it too had changed. A blood-red beacon, it appeared to wander with a mind of its own and trailed in its wake the Pilgrim and his Cholercaust Blood Crusade. The daemons, cultists and World Eaters seemed to believe that the cursed comet embodied the will of their Chaos god and would lead them across the stars in a celebration of slaughter, right to the Imperium’s finest and Holy Terra itself.

That was until the comet appeared in the skies of a tiny cemetery world in the Praga subsector. Until the Cholercaust came to Certus-Minor and the Blood God’s butchers became the butchered.

A shadow screamed above. The thunder of engines passed straight through Quast and an involuntary instinct shocked the approbator into ducking his head and dropping into a crouch amongst the rot. The wash of the thruster trail bathed the area about Quast in a dry heat. Squinting through the blaze of afterburning engines, the acolyte stood and watched the craft rocket across the corpse-strewn necroplex before banking and taking in the ruins of Obsequa City in a double pass.

Even serving in the ranks of the Holy Emperor’s Inquisition, Quast had only seen such a craft once before. It was a Thunderhawk gunship, the Adeptus Astartes’ fearsome steed amongst the stars. Spinning around, the approbator saw that another had punched through the sheen of pearly cloud, dropping silently like the first in a controlled free-fall, thrusters ready to snatch it from gravity’s embrace and slingshot the gunship across the cemetery world surface. A swarm of gunships followed, spearing down through the heavens in formation, before peeling off to take position above the killing fields, around the demolished city.

‘Sir, the vessel has made itself known to us,’ the vox-bead in Quast’s ear announced.

‘Proceed.’

‘Adeptus Astartes battle-barge Cerberus . Golden Throne, she’s huge.’

‘To which Chapter does this blessed vessel belong?’ Quast pushed.

‘The Excoriators, approbator.’

Quast nodded. It made sense. Among the warped and wretched servants of Chaos, the acolyte had come across numerous Adeptus Astartes dead, all armoured in the holy plate of the Excoriators Chapter. The defenders of a doomed world.

‘Have the captain greet the Cerberus and inform the battle-barge commander of our presence in orbit and on the planet surface. Extend my compliments and that of the ordo, then beg an audience for myself with the ranking Adeptus Astartes among their number.’

‘What are the Emperor’s Angels doing here, sir?’

‘I do not know,’ the approbator admitted, ‘but I intend to find out. Quast out.’

The acolyte left the Valkyrie and its storm trooper contingent and struck out across the slaughter. He walked for the ruined city and the gathering of gunships that hovered with ominous intent above the carnage. Clambering across the twisted dead and the expanse of tombstones beneath, Quast spoke into his meme-vox.

‘The Excoriators,’ he said, out of breath. ‘Battle-brothers of the Great Dorn’s seed. Their reputation is for fearsome feats of stamina and attrition. The Codex Astartes records the Excoriators as created from the ranks of the Imperial Fists post-Heresy, during the dark days of the Second Founding. This in recognition of their stalwart defence of the Imperial Palace during the Siege of Terra.’

The approbator’s eyes settled upon a particularly horrific visage, daemonflesh that leered murderous lust at Quast, even after its destruction and banishment. For a moment the corpse-thing held his horrid attention before the acolyte forced his eyes closed and stumbled on across the battlefield. ‘The Excoriators are listed in the Mythos Angelica Mortis as one of the Astartes Praeses,’ Quast continued, ‘those Space Marine Chapters charged with the solemn duty of guarding the Eye of Terror and the vulnerable regions of Imperial space bordering.’

He slipped a small pair of magnoculars from the folds of his robes and scanned the dun-white lengths of the Excoriators Thunderhawks. ‘Markings indicate the presence of the Third, Sixth and Eighth Companies. Three companies and a Chapter battle-barge suggests an undertaking of extreme importance. Cross reference with Telepathica transmittal 44L-21-Digamma/Theta, intercepted from the Stroika-Six Observium Array.’

The approbator attempted to make his presence known to the nearest Thunderhawk. He held up his ordo identification and waved his arm at the craft. The pilot took little notice of the tiny Quast, amongst the bodies and funeral sculpture, and the craft held its station above a corpse-strewn blast crater. The lead Thunderhawk, the scout ship that had preceded the formation of gunships, took another pass, however, once more prompting Quast to crouch down in the blood and the mire.