The Emperor's Finest, page 2
From The Virus of Betrayal: The Cleansing of Viridia and its Aftermath by Lady Ottaline Melmoth, 958.M41.
IT'S UNDOUBTEDLY FAIR to say that the first few months of what was to become the Viridian Insurrection gave few clues as to the scope of the chaos and carnage to come. What had begun as a wave of popular protest against the mooted imposition of a two per cent tax on incense and votive candles by the Administratum erupted into violence in several provinces almost simultaneously. With hindsight, of course, we can see how carefully events were orchestrated, from the moment an agent of the conspiracy first slipped the controversial measure into the fiscal projections for the following year. Despite the protestations of the planetary governor that he'd never seen the proposal, and certainly wouldn't have approved it if he had, a large section of the population laid the blame for it squarely at his door, some even going so far as to begin calling him ''Alaric the Heretic'' (a nickname which the poor man remains saddled with even today, albeit now in jest).
How much of the Ecclesiarchy's predictable condemnation of the so-called ''tax on piety'' was spontaneous, and how much the result of infiltration of their ranks, we can only conjecture, but there's no denying the outrage with which the average Viridian in the thoroughfare reacted. We've always been proud to call ourselves an Emperor-fearing folk, and the prospect of being unable to afford to maintain the tiny shrines which grace even the humblest hovel, or to do so only at the expense of starvation and destitution, a choice many of our poorest citizens would undoubtedly have made, was all but intolerable to most of the proletariat.
In vain, Governor DuPanya pledged that he personally would make sure that the proposed legislation was never enacted. By the beginning of 928, the ''piety tax'' had become a rallying point for malcontents of all kinds, united only in their dislike of the planetary government. After the initial riots had been suppressed by the Guardians 6 , backed up by elements from the Planetary Defence Force in a few cases, the inevitable casualties among the civilian population became the focus of fresh resentment, and the wave of unrest intensified. With what seemed at the time to be astonishing rapidity, but which with hindsight is clearly the result of careful coordination by the shadowy enemy whose existence as yet no one even suspected, Viridia became all but ungovernable, and Governor DuPanya was left with no choice but to appeal to the Imperial Guard for help.
Help was not slow in coming, but the distance between stars is a vast one, and many agonising months were to pass before the vanguard of the relief force arrived in our system. To the joy and astonishment of all loyal Imperial citizens, the vessel was no Imperial Guard troopship, but a battle-barge 7 of the Astartes, bearing not only the matchless warriors of the Space Marines, but Commissar Cain, the hero whose exploits against the orkish invaders of Perlia had inspired billions across the sector.
As fate was to have it, however, no sooner had the Revenant reentered the materium than it was treacherously attacked, the anarchy which had by then overwhelmed our home world having spread to engulf the void stations and mining habs scattered throughout the system.
TWO
HAVING NO BETTER plan in mind, I followed Drumon to the bridge. If necessary, I was prepared to argue that my position as liaison officer made it my business to remain abreast of any unexpected developments, although to be honest I just thought that would be the best place to find out what in the Throne's name was going on. I've been involved in a fair number of space battles in my time, far more than any Guardsman has a right to expect, and in all too many of them the only thing I could do was sit there and wait for the troopship to take a hit. At least on the bridge you can watch events unfolding in the hololith, which introduces a curious kind of detachment into the proceedings, as the contact icons go through their stately dance of life and death.
In the event, however, no one challenged my right to be there, which came as a welcome surprise. In fact, the only thing which surprised me more was that until Drumon arrived, there were no Astartes on the bridge at all.
'Techmarine.' The vessel's captain, who for some reason rejoiced in the title of shipmaster 1 , vacated his control throne and inclined his head respectfully. (Not something the Navy would appreciate, having the man in charge abandon his duty for the sake of protocol in the middle of a battle, but the Space Marine Chapters, as I was already beginning to grasp, have a different perspective on things. Quite how different I wouldn't fully understand for a few more decades, however.)
'Carry on, shipmaster.' Drumon acknowledged the greeting with a barely perceptible nod of his own, and the shipmaster resumed his seat, absorbed again at once in the flurry of information blizzarding across his pict screen. One of the control stations ranged about the hushed and dimly lit chamber, through which the muted chanting and clouds of incense from the tech-adepts servicing the targeting systems drifted, remained vacant, and as the towering figure of the Techmarine took his place before it, I realised that it was placed higher than the others, where a standing man more than two metres tall could work at it comfortably. The other lecterns were manned by Chapter serfs in uniforms similar to those of the Imperial Navy, although their insignia were different, no doubt reflecting their affiliation and status in some manner I couldn't be bothered to enquire about at the moment.
'What's happening?' I asked, and Drumon glanced briefly in my direction as though surprised to be reminded of my presence, his gauntleted fingers continuing to rattle the keys of the data lectern. A blizzard of images, changing too rapidly for me to assimilate, danced across his face, reflected from the display in front of him.
'We have sustained only minimal damage,' he assured me, which came as a tremendous relief. The last time I'd been aboard a vessel under fire I'd ended up breathing vacuum, fortunately for no more than a handful of seconds, although it had seemed a great deal longer to Jurgen and I. The Revenant was made of sterner stuff than the venerable troopship which had delivered me to Perlia, however, being designed to be capable of holding her own against a ship of the line, and the voices around me were reassuringly calm.
'Who from?' I persisted, and if Drumon was irritated at all, he was too polite to show it. By way of reply he activated a nearby pict-screen, and I found myself looking at a slightly blurred image of a System Defence corvette.
'Viridian vessel, this is the strike cruiser Revenant, of the Reclaimers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes,' the shipmaster said, his voice clipped. 'Break off and surrender, or be destroyed in the name of the Emperor.'
'They're turning,' one of the vassals said, his voice equally matter-of-fact. 'Looks like another attack run.'
'Gunnery stations stand by,' the shipmaster said, then glanced at Drumon for approval.
The Techmarine nodded again. 'All weapon batteries charged and ready,' he assured the crew, his voice carrying easily to every corner of the bridge.
'Fire when ready,' the shipmaster said, his voice as calm as if he'd just ordered a mug of recaf. 'Wait for a positive lock.' The seconds stretched unbearably, the image of the attacking vessel growing ever larger on my screen, until I expected to see ravening beams of energy lancing out from it with every heartbeat.
'Target acquired,' another of the bridge crew said, seeming equally relaxed, and I finally realised that it was Drumon's presence which was making them so dispassionately efficient. Nobody wanted to be the one to let the crew down in front of their masters, so they were all doing it by the book, instead of cutting corners and giving way to impulsive profanity like the Guard troopers I was used to herding so often did when the las-bolts started flying.
A moment later the attacking corvette broke apart, like a seed-head on the wind, as our starboard batteries tore the guts out of it, to leave a slowly dissipating cloud of debris drifting apart in the void.
'Who were they, though?' I asked, not really expecting an answer, but the auspex man answered me anyway.
'The IFF beacon tagged it as the Lady Helene, one of the local System Defence boats 2 .'
'Then they ought to have been on our side,' I said, beginning to feel that matters weren't going to be quite so simple after all. If part of the SDF had mutinied, then the chances were that a substantial proportion of their counterparts in the PDF had followed suit (or, more likely, led by example).
'Acknowledged,' Drumon rumbled, and for a moment I thought he'd responded to my comment, before I realised that he'd probably been too busy listening to the voice in his comm-bead to have even heard it. 'I will inform the commissar.'
'Inform me of what?' I asked, already more than half-convinced that I didn't want to know. His first words were enough to tell me I was right about that.
'The situation has deteriorated significantly,' he said, with commendable restraint. 'According to our signal intercepts, a state of civil war now exists throughout the system.'
'Frakking great,' I said, seeing little need to restrain myself under the circumstances. 'Does Captain Gries have any suggestions for dealing with it?'
I'd got to know Drumon well enough by now to be fairly confident that the expression which ghosted across his face was one of faint surprise that I'd even bothered to ask. 'Intervene at once,' he said, then broke off to listen to a voice in his earpiece. 'He is embarking in the hangar deck as we speak, and extends an invitation for you to join him.'
Not, needless to say, an invitation I could even consider refusing. I was there to liaise with the Reclaimers' command staff, which basically meant Gries, so wherever he went, I had to go too. At least until the Imperial Guard forces turned up, and I could find some plausible excuse to go and bother them instead.
'I'd be delighted,' I said, hoping I sounded as though I meant it.
I'D ARRIVED ABOARD the Revenant by teleporter, and been unconscious at the time into the bargain, so this was my first sight of the warship's hangar bay. My immediate impression as I walked through the airtight hatch, which slid closed behind me with a squeal of metal against metal, was one of purposeful activity. The inevitable crowd of Chapter serfs was bustling about under the supervision of a handful whose bearing and demeanour betokened higher rank than their fellows, even though the iconography of their uniforms continued to be strange to me. A startling number of them had visible augmetics, which either indicated a fair degree of hazard in their occupations (even by the standards of serving aboard a warship), or the kind of willingness to voluntarily adopt whatever enhancements would assist their work I'd previously encountered only among the Adeptus Mechanicus. I suspected the latter, as I'd gathered from the skitarii aboard the Omnissiah's Bounty that some kind of pact existed between the Reclaimers and the acolytes of the Machine-God, but there was no time to think about that now. Gries and his entourage were clearly visible in the distance, towering over the surrounding crewmen, and I set off across the echoing metal plain between us as quickly as possible.
Like every hangar I'd ever been in, the chamber was vast, but the very scale of it felt curiously comforting; for the first time since coming aboard I felt a measure of relief from the nagging sense of strangeness I'd experienced everywhere else about the vessel, whose corridors and hatchways had been designed to accommodate the greater-than-human bulk of Space Marines, and left me feeling curiously shrunken. Unlike the docking bays I'd passed through while embarking and departing from troopships, however, the vast space felt clinically efficient. All the apparatus required to refuel and rearm the pair of Thunderhawks currently occupying it was neatly stowed, and there was a marked absence of cargo pallets and other detritus cluttering up the place.
The Thunderhawks were impressive enough, too, and I slowed my pace a little as I neared the closer of them. They weren't as large as the platoon-sized drop-ships the Guard routinely used, let alone the company-sized behemoths I'd ridden in on occasion, but their blocky solidity looked immediately reassuring. Their heavy armour could doubtless soak up a lot of incoming fire, and they seemed more than capable of dishing it out as well as taking it, judging by the amount of ordnance I could see hanging off their airframes. They were painted yellow and white, like the armour of the Astartes marching up the boarding ramp of the one I was approaching, their simultaneous footfalls echoing off the metal mesh like drumbeats, and looked as fresh as if they'd just been rolled out for the first time. Having gathered a little of how much tradition meant to a Space Marine Chapter, I had no doubt that they were considerably more venerable than they appeared, perhaps even centuries old, but their immaculate condition was a tribute to Drumon and the serf enginseers he supervised. It heartened me, too, I have to admit, as I found it hard to conceive of an enemy capable of standing against such a formidable vessel.
I trotted up the ramp in the wake of the power-armoured giants ahead of me, and found myself in a passenger compartment constructed on the same cyclopean lines as everything else sized for Astartes. Only about half of the seats were occupied, and I scrambled into one of the empty ones, feeling oddly like a child in an adult's armchair as I fumbled with the crash webbing. My feet hung awkwardly above the deck plates, and I was unable to draw the webbing quite as tight as I would have wished, but at least I had room for my chainsword without having to remove it from my belt, as would have been the case aboard an Imperial Guard landing barge.
'Commissar.' Gries's helmet turned in my direction, easy to identify, as it was as richly ornamented as his armour and surmounted by a crest of green and black. 'Are you prepared?'
'By the Emperor's grace,' I replied, falling back on one of the stock responses which I generally used to avoid committing myself, and feeling it wouldn't hurt to look a bit more pious than usual surrounded by so many paragons. There were fifteen of them in all: Gries's command squad, which I was pleased to see included Sholer, his narthecium ready for use on his left vambrace, and ten tactical troopers, already broken down into two combat squads. Most carried bolters, which I was more used to seeing mounted on armoured vehicles, as easily as a Guardsman handled his lasgun, while two of their comrades were equipped with heavy weapons it would have taken a team of ordinary troopers to use effectively on the battlefield. One carried a missile launcher, several reloads pouched at his waist, while another casually hefted the first man-portable lascannon I'd ever seen without a groundmount. The faceplates of their helmets were all the same yellow as their gauntlets, although the captain's shone with the lustre of gilding rather than pigment.
'May He watch over us all,' Gries intoned in response, although, to my surprise, he made the cogwheel gesture I generally associated with members of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than the sign of the aquila.
I didn't have much time to think about that, though, because the boarding ramp was retracting, and the engines fired up to a pitch which left my ears ringing. It might have been fine for the Astartes, whose heads were cocooned inside their helmets, but it was distinctly uncomfortable for me. There was no point complaining about it, however, even if anyone could have heard me, so I just pulled my cap down as far as it would go, and quietly resolved to get hold of some earplugs before I accepted another lift in a Thunderhawk.
'Look in the locker to your left,' the nearest Reclaimer said, his words just about audible over the howling of the engines, even amplified by the vox built into his helmet. With some difficulty I followed his suggestion, since everything was laid out for far longer arms than mine, and discovered a comms headset with padded earpieces and a vox mic on a stalk. I donned it gratefully, and found the noise almost instantly reduced to a level I considered bearable.
'Thank you,' I responded, feeling faintly foolish.
'This is our primary objective,' Gries said, activating a pict screen. It seemed someone on his staff had been busy in the relatively short time since our arrival in-system, and had managed to gather a remarkable amount of information. 'Fidelis, the planetary capital, currently being fought over by three of the major rebel factions. The loyalist forces are dug in around the Administratum cloister, the cathedral precincts, the Mechanicus shrine and the governor's palace, no doubt hoping the rebels will whittle one another down for them.' The landmarks he'd indicated flared green on the map. 'We'll deploy from the palace. If we can assure the safety of the governor, then the Emperor's rule should be swiftly restored.'
I found myself nodding in agreement - always assuming the man was still alive, of course. If he wasn't, and had been inconsiderate enough to expire without leaving a clear line of succession, the resulting confusion as conflicting claimants brawled for the throne would probably make things ten times worse.
'I take it you have good reason to believe he's still in charge,' I said, more to show I was paying attention than anything else. Gries's helmet dipped in almost imperceptible acknowledgement.
'He made a pictcast five hours ago, appealing for calm and promising retribution against all who continued to defy the Emperor's will. The rebels responded as one might expect.'
'Shelling the palace?' I asked, and the captain's helmet inclined again.
'Given the amount of damage the building has already sustained, we can infer that he managed to survive the latest bombardment with little difficulty.' He adjusted the image on the pict screen, and the palace and its grounds rushed towards us, filling the frame. Either the Revenant carried some of the most sophisticated long-range sensors I'd ever come across, or Drumon had managed to gain access to the PDF's orbital net, because according to the time stamp in the corner the image was a current one. The palace itself showed signs of extensive damage, an entire wing burned out and roofless, while the rest of the structure was pocked with the stigmata of heavy ordnance. The perimeter walls, which had been designed with this sort of contingency in mind, had evidently withstood several assaults already, and been shored up or strengthened in a few places, although, to my relief, I couldn't see any actual breaches. The muddy wasteland separating the two, which had presumably once been formal gardens, was criss-crossed with trenches and the tracks of armoured vehicles, several dozen of which could be seen parked around the place. That was good news, if nothing else, as it meant there would be a substantial garrison of PDF loyalists to hide behind if, by some inconceivable quirk of fate, I was to run out of Space Marines.
