Final deployment, p.1
Final Deployment, page 1
Contents
Cover
Warhammer 40,000
Final Deployment
Prologue
ONE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
TWO
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
THREE
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘The Fall of Cadia’
Backlist
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of his inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, he is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so his may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
PROLOGUE
He did not trust himself to sweat.
The air of the senate chambers was stagnant and stiflingly hot as General Hurdt marched into position before the governor’s dais. He sucked on his teeth, fancying he could draw fresh fluid from the mean yield of his parched salivary glands, and not for the first time that day craved a sip of water.
It had been fifteen hours since he had last permitted himself a drink, knowing that the morning’s schedule would not provide him with an opportunity to relieve himself. He was to be at the forefront of his division throughout the day’s celebrations. His bearing and the wear of his uniform would be painstakingly recorded and scrutinised. The assembled luminaries and their attendant courtiers, gossips and lickspittles would spend weeks afterwards dissecting even the smallest imperfection – there was no place for human weakness before the great and the good of Rilis. Even celebrating the return of their honoured sons and daughters from a war waged across the stars, the assembled potentates relished any fault they could scent with their powdered noses, or pluck loose with their long, avaricious fingers.
Sweat could betray him. The meanest trickle from his forehead would draw scrutiny, and too soon. So too could it unman him, serving as an inopportune, personal reminder of the frailty and human weakness the gathered leaders so despised in others but revelled in themselves.
He could not afford the luxury of weakness at such a time as this, and so he rose above it, bearing the heat and scrutiny for the sake of Rilis and his Third Division. Just as he had borne the rehearsals for this ceremony, twelve hours a day for a week in the sweltering heat, he would bear this. Only perfection would do for the world’s highborn, who claimed to represent the rest of Rilis’ sons and daughters.
To his left, his division’s colours drooped in the lifeless air, the gold-fringed sky-blue flag emblazoned with the armoured track and lightning bolt emblem of the Third Rilisian Heavy Division. Behind him stood his two surviving regimental commanders at the heads of their reconstituted command squads, their standards equally motionless.
Survivors of Captain Dorran’s company of Stygians occupied the gallery above. Faceless in their black carapace armour, they were inert as statues, save for the humming of the capacitor backpacks powering the hellguns they held across their chests.
Hurdt suppressed a shudder. Though their supreme discipline remained unwavering, none of these Stygians had returned from Oranesca’s depths unchanged. The Third Division itself had lost more than half of its complement beneath the orbital bombardment – that any of his command survived at all might appear the divine will of the God-Emperor made manifest.
The general knew better. Engineered by Dorran, the method by which the Rilisian forces had achieved their salvation from the depths of the collapsed hive city was something Hurdt had not yet come to terms with.
Summer had come early to Vytrum, and the rest of his division stood in formation outside, enduring the day’s oppressive heat in full regalia. Despite the baking sun above, Hurdt found himself envying them the breeze on their faces. There was no such respite for him beneath the glaring lumens of the chamber and the covetous scrutiny of the lord governor and the assembled senate.
Hurdt wished for even the slightest breath of air where he stood beneath the sweltering lights illuminating the Dais Aquila and its lectern of black stone and burnished gold from which the governor presided. The general was no longer a young man, and though he appeared far younger than one fast approaching his first century, years and war had taken their ineluctable toll. Unable to sweat, he found himself silently praying for relief as he waited for the eternity it seemed to take for the senate to assemble.
Despite the headache pounding in his forehead, Hurdt stood at stiff attention, sweltering in his full panoply – ochre breastplate and pauldrons, trimmed in Imperial gold, atop his brown leather greatcoat and drab floxwool uniform beneath. Polished and restored since his return to Rilis, his power sword hung upon his left hip, while his bolt pistol rested in its buffed holster of brown leather, its grip angled for speed draw, upon his right.
Above, limp tapestries lolled like parched tongues from the vaulted ceiling. Grim bas-reliefs and carved effigies depicting the final, contorted moments of Imperial saints and martyrs leered from the chamber’s walls, with every inch of space that might otherwise remain blank seemingly embellished with skulls both graven and real.
The skulls filled his sight, displacing the grinning, simpering assembly gathering before him. Skulls covered everything, more ubiquitous in the gallery than representations of the aquila itself. They watched expectantly, the dark hollows of eyes delineative of the Guardsmen he had left in the smoking pit of Oranesca Hive, waiting to see how their general acquitted himself.
The darkness of their eyes swallowed him, carrying him below.
Darkness.
Crushing, soaking, screaming darkness.
Darkness, like a dead weight on his chest, as the world collapsed.
Hurdt glanced about, fearing for a moment that he had fallen faint. He remained on his feet at the centre of the senate audience chamber. All about him was as it had been before, save that now the governor was addressing them.
He wondered how much he had missed.
‘…ultimately crushing the Enthan Schism, bringing the God-Emperor’s righteous justice and restoring the light of true faith to that once-benighted shrine world!’ said Armitage Montcomme, lord governor of Rilis and Ganspur. Montcomme beamed from his lectern, centuries of juvenat treatments rendering his visage a taut rictus that appeared ready to snap free of his skull at any moment. Montcomme’s scarlet robes rustled, his liver-spotted scalp gleaming in the harsh light as he raised his arms in thanksgiving. ‘We rejoice that Rilis continues to enjoy the blessings of the Golden Throne, thanks to the glorious efforts of General Hurdt and his division.’
‘Half,’ Hurdt said.
‘Eh, what?’ Montcomme asked, lowering his hands. He still grinned, despite his confusion, and Hurdt wondered if the lord governor remained capable of any other expression.
‘I’ve only half a division, my lord governor. The rest lie beneath the rubble of Oranesca Hive, where our noble allies, the Fire Angels Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, buried them.’
‘Indeed,’ Montcomme stammered, wrong-footed by being forced off-script. ‘It’s, uh… it is a miracle which returned you to Rilis’, uh, bosom! The… the blessings of the Throne–’
‘The Throne blesses Rilis with children enough to die where you decree, in the Emperor’s name, my lord,’ Hurdt said. ‘The Throne blesses the children of Rilis with thrifty minds and skilful hands, then sends the fruits of their labours as far afield as Hydraphur to feed the hunger of a war machine as insatiable as it is uncaring.’ He grinned. ‘The Throne certainly blesses you, my noble lords, with such means and comfort as the sons and daughters of Rilis and Ganspur could scarce imagine from the luxury of their field cots! If such are the blessings of the Golden Throne, my good lord governor, then we, the children of Rilis, have had our fill of them.’
The assembled senators murmured amongst themselves in agitation. This confrontation had not been on the programme.
‘Surely,’ Hurdt continued, ‘the God-Emperor Himself smiles upon you, you assembly of craven jackals!’
‘The martyrs–’ Montcomme spluttered.
Hurdt scoffed. ‘Isn’t that what you always call us, irrespective of where we die fighting and who kills us?’
Hurd
Montcomme’s expression of surprise was only momentary, before Hurdt shot him in the face.
The Stygians in the gallery above opened fire on the senate before the governor’s headless corpse had time to reach the ground. Hotshot las-fire burned through the assembled senators’ finery as if it were insubstantial as smoke.
General Hurdt holstered his bolt pistol and left the Stygians to their work. Turning on his heel, he marched back out the way he had come in, leaving the crack of las-fire and the screams of Rilis’ masters echoing behind him as he rejoined the remains of his division outside.
He really needed a drink.
ONE
FROM STRENGTH COMETH WILL
I
Norroll was first out, as usual, plummeting from the edge of space.
The Valkyrie fell away rapidly, thirty-eight miles above the planet, as Norroll plunged through the upper atmosphere at speeds high enough to crack the sound barrier. He grinned beneath his rebreather, his carapace armour protecting him from low pressure and murderously cold temperatures as he made his descent, unmarked, towards his objective below. He relished the opportunity – such drops had been uncommon since his departure from his old Aquilon squad two years earlier.
Departure. That was one way to understand it.
‘Norroll, report.’
Transmitted through the clarion vox-net, Tempestor Traxel’s order, delivered in his customarily clipped, stentorian tone, reached Norroll as clearly as if they were seated next to one another.
‘Just lost in thought, sir.’
‘I’d be concerned about that if you could think.’
‘You’ll doubtless be pleased to know that I’ve been reflecting upon my pre-mission reading. Nice and clear up here, boss. Orbital ring’s beautiful, this time of day.’
‘I’m glad you’re enjoying your sightseeing tour.’
‘Thank you, Tempestor.’
‘Now do your job.’
The northern continent’s central plains stretched out beneath him, a dustbowl of dun ochre intermittently broken by broad thickets of tangled, drab olive scrub and crisscrossed by barren red-orange rivers meandering lifelessly across the flatland. The largest of these rivers, the Zholm, was home to some of Rilis’ finest orchards, the culmination of a desperate initiative to renew an environment ravaged by millennia of overmining and rapacious industrial production. Generations of farmers spent their lives attempting to coax life from the planet’s appallingly polluted soil.
As cleverly as the planet’s leaders had packaged it, Norroll was not fooled by the pale attempt at renewal – Rilis was a war world. Every child born, every scrap of ore grubbed from the soil, was earmarked for the Departmento Munitorum; the planet’s restoration took whatever pittance remained.
If the collective illusion of working for some notion of a better future ensured the Rilisians looked forward to their tithe quotas, so be it. Despite his general indifference to such things, Norroll found the concept novel.
‘Status at objective?’ Norroll voxed.
‘Unknown,’ Replendus, the eradicant’s vox-operator and newest member, replied. Norroll hardly knew the Scion at all, save that he had been remanded to First Eradicant for some manner of tech-heresy or other during an operation with his previous squad. Replendus had just replaced Trooper Lo, who had been killed during the cleansing of the Vero Salient. Lo had himself replaced Trooper Ochuthi, who had been killed by a sniper on Antarill. Ochuthi had replaced Actis, cut down six months earlier by blood-mad murder-cultists on Tecerriot.
First Eradicant was hell on vox-operators.
‘Xi-Three-One’s Taurox Prime is transmitting,’ Replendus continued. ‘Strong signal. Encrypted, but zero data.’
‘Lights are on, but nobody’s home.’
At seven miles high, the atmosphere thickened and Norroll began to spin, reducing his headlong terminal velocity to around one hundred and eighty miles per hour. The entirety of the front spread out beneath him – the Zholm River, like fresh blood slowly oozing across a dry and blackened scab, wended across a battlefield six miles deep and nearly twenty miles long. Serried lines of broken trenches and reinforced earthworks scarred the length and breadth of the battleground, separated by the ample swathes of blackened earth, churned and heavily cratered, that delimited no-man’s-land. Thick mustard-yellow clouds of dust blended with billowing plumes of suffocating black smoke to create an impenetrable smog that boiled upwards from directly beneath him, obscuring all detail in his landing zone.
He checked his position relative to Xi-3-1’s Taurox Prime on his slate monitron, the portable data-slate mounted to his armour’s right vambrace. ‘Six point three-five miles above objective,’ Norroll reported into the vox. ‘Winds have blown me a bit westward, so I’ll have to make up the difference on foot.’
Unlike the sophisticated grav-chutes Norroll had employed with the Aquilon squads, his current unit – a pair of suspensor fins mounted on either side of his backpack – allowed for little in terms of steering. Though eradicants were more tactically flexible than either a standard Tempest squad or the Aquilons, such flexibility carried drawbacks of its own.
‘What do you see?’ Traxel asked.
‘Battlefield specs look pretty much as reported from up here, but I have zero visibility on the dropsite due to obscuration from smoke and dust.’ Norroll keyed a rune on his data-slate. ‘I’m deploying Actis.’
‘Throne, Norroll,’ Bissot sighed. ‘Don’t call it that.’
The reconnaissance servo-skull uncoupled from its mount on his backpack. A large augur display was fixed to the skull’s right hemisphere, and its right socket was now a repository for a plan position indicator. Considerably more powerful than a conventional auspex scanner, Actis was connected directly to Norroll’s capacitor unit, feeding power to the variety of sensory apparatus studding its cranium. A snaking network of steel-banded cables slid into a series of sockets in Norroll’s armour, interfacing with his data-slate and his helmet’s visual display.
‘Eight hundred feet,’ Norroll announced. ‘Deploying grav-chute.’ Seven blips arrayed across his optical heads-up display. ‘I’ve got seven marks in the landing zone.’
‘Noted,’ Traxel acknowledged. ‘Neutralise and continue mission. We jump on your mark.’
Dropping silently through the cloud, Norroll primed a frag grenade. Setting it for a five-second fuse, he tossed it towards a cluster of four blips to his left and drew his monoblades.
Actis’ augurs fed data directly into the tactical array in Norroll’s omnishield helm, marking the troopers with outlines of green light. As he plunged through the smoke, Norroll’s descent was unobserved, the faint buzz of his grav-chute obscured by the crackle of armoured vehicles burning nearby, distant volleys of artillery and the panicked shouts from the four troopers when the grenade plunked onto the ground amidst them.
‘Begin jump.’
Even before he landed, he was on them, his right monoblade slicing into the unprotected area between chinstrap and flak collar of one as the left slipped between the base of the skull and first vertebra of another. Withdrawing the blades, Norroll landed in a crouch, using his legs as springs as he redirected the force of his landing, pistoning forward into a third trooper before the first two hit the ground. Norroll eviscerated him, thrusting one blade between the trooper’s belt buckle and flak armour and cutting upwards and sideways with a flick of his wrist, then plunged the second blade through his trachea, just to be certain. Orienting on the four other Guardsmen as he shoulder-rolled over the disembowelled trooper, Norroll came up on one knee, sheathing his right monoblade and drawing his hotshot laspistol.
The grenade exploded, spearing through the remaining four troopers in a squall of fragments. Cut down by shrapnel, the two nearest the blast fell outright, while a third was seriously injured.
Norroll dropped the furthest, least injured of the troopers with four quick shots from his hellpistol. Giving the wounded trooper no time to react, Norroll charged him, opening his throat with a monoblade and ducking aside before the blood had time to spurt from the wound.
Norroll sheathed the blade and drew a locator beacon from one of his belt pouches, then thumbed it active, dropping it next to the man he had just killed. He shot the two troopers who had been injured by the grenade’s blast between the eyes and ran on.
