Soldiers of the Imperium, page 67
Catching her breath, Aerand stepped away from the cloying smoke and carnage, watching the immaterium suddenly take shape again in her mind.
Three platoons silenced, and not a single psyker among them, at least none that had put up a speck of a fight. Still, she braced herself for an impending psionic assault, as she ventured out with her exhausted senses, then recoiled. A few hundred yards away, the rest of the Witchbringer’s host was approaching. At least two hundred troopers and three dozen psykers blazing through the warp along with them.
Vyse stepped up beside her, setting a hand on her shoulder and helping her to her unsteady feet. Aerand had never seen the woman shaken before, but she felt hesitancy in Vyse’s touch, too tired to probe the emotion further.
‘We need to leave. Now,’ Aerand mumbled, her eyes swimming.
Vyse’s strong arms grasped her as she dropped to her knees. ‘I don’t need a Throne-cursed psyker to tell me that.’
CHAPTER 7
She had stood less than a dozen yards from him.
She had stood less than a dozen yards from him, and now she was at least a mile away.
The Colonel shook as rough hands tore him from the smoking carcass of his Baneblade, coughing as he pulled a respirator from his face. It had taken two plasma cutters nearly half an hour to burn through the blistered, dented armoured panels that had pinned him in the pilot’s throne. Gouts of oily smoke plumed from the dying vehicle behind him, as he pushed the sergeant away and stumbled to his feet, coughing.
‘Gone,’ he managed eventually.
The sergeant nodded. ‘Two veteran companies are in pursuit as we speak.’
The Colonel cursed himself. Close enough that he could have put a bolt straight through her head, but the psyker was no use to him dead. ‘We should have pushed her harder.’
The sergeant simply shrugged. Such things were often clear in hindsight.
But Throne, she had been glorious.
‘She’s the one, then?’ the sergeant asked.
The Colonel managed a tired nod. He’d poured half a company and a Baneblade into her, and she’d simply brushed it all aside.
‘As powerful as her predecessor, without half the experience.’
Veterans, no matter how strong or skilled, did not face down a Baneblade in the absence of cover.
‘The marsh priests will be pleased that you’ve found their messiah,’ the sergeant replied humourlessly.
‘I’m sure they will.’
Aerand wiped a thin trickle of blood from her nose with a hand that would not stop shaking. A tremor wracked her body, pitching her forward, as the psionic bridle on her neck blunted yet another psychic attack. The branching cables rooted in the base of her skull grew suddenly hot, and she wondered, not for the first time, if the scent of burning flesh in her nose was merely an after-effect of the warp assaults being thrown at her like missiles, or true physical damage to her body from her augmetics being pushed past their mechanical limits.
Aerand stumbled once, then righted herself, flinging a feeble counter-attack back at the unseen assailant. She was no formidable telepath to begin with, and she hardly qualified as a psyker at all in her current state, but perhaps it would make the next marsh priest hesitate.
To say she was exhausted would be almost heretical in its understatement. To say she had reached, and then burst through, her psionic and physical limits felt more accurate, although that must not have strictly been true, for she still walked under her own power, if barely.
Beside her, Captain Vyse grunted, sloshing through dark water just over her waist. Even without the psychic burden Aerand carried, the quick march from Charity had been gruelling, but the captain showed no signs of physical fatigue. At her side, a squad of heavy troopers roamed with autocannons and lascannons trained on the rolling waves of mist behind Secundus Company. It had been nearly a mile since the last of the Witchbringer’s forces had physically harried the retreating Imperial Guard, but now was not the time to take chances.
‘I felt that one,’ Vyse said, a grimace across her face. The unseen accusation behind her words was that Aerand should have done something more to stop the psychic intrusion.
‘I imagine you did,’ the psyker responded. ‘And it might have been a hundred-fold worse.’
Aerand stumbled again as the ground rose beneath the water, looking up from her feet at the small patch of earth rising out of the murky ocean. The faintly dark hue of rockcrete marred the otherwise verdant patch of undergrowth.
‘Thank the Emperor,’ Corwyn muttered beside her, stepping up onto the disrepaired pathway. Gravel crunched beneath his sopping boots and his feet sank slightly in the muddy earth, which had already been churned by the hundred troopers who had passed before them. Not exactly a kasr parade ground, but a blessed relief after a dozen miles of unending sea.
Aerand allowed herself a sigh of relief. If they had already reached the outroads trickling towards Providence, that meant the capital city, and the relative protection of its sea wall, lay precious little distance away.
Perhaps they would make it, after all.
As she stared forward into the mist, searching for any sign of Javax Cathedral’s dark silhouette, a searing lance of pain shot directly between her eyes. The taste of copper filled her mouth and her vision swam before she found herself on her knees in the mud. Her bridle warmed for a moment, then she felt the assault subside. It seemed their enemy realised that Secundus Company would soon become more challenging quarry and were playing their final cards.
Rough hands pulled Aerand back onto her feet, and Vyse looked at her with a hint of concern before stifling the emotion.
‘How far away are they?’ she asked, her voice like ice.
Aerand allowed herself a bitter chuckle in response, and spat blood into the dirt. She hardly had the energy to see the path beneath her feet, let alone the psionic signature of souls on the surface of the empyrean. If not for the tendrils of platinum embedded in her neural cortex and the psionic dampener in the cradle on her neck, she would be no more useful right now against the Witchbringer’s psykers than any of the ungifted who walked beside her.
She had pushed herself hard in the initial counter-attack against the Witchbringer’s forces, then spent every bit of will she had remaining drop by drop over the course of the last six hours. A handful of troopers lay dead in the murky waters behind them, but most of Secundus Company would have been drowned beside them if not for the unceasing vigil she had held, and both Vyse and Corwyn knew it.
A dozen minor sendings to throw false trails to their pursuers. Twice that many subtle telekinetic twists to clear corpsewood groves from their path or speed lagging troopers. And atop it all she had blunted more direct psychic assaults meant for the soldiers around her than she could keep count of, each one striking a bit harder and a bit deeper as her will began to flag.
‘She comes with us the entire way,’ Captain Vyse growled at a young trooper. ‘I don’t care if you have to carry her through the gates yourself.’
Obediently, the soldier grasped Aerand’s arm and threw it over one of his shoulders. Even as exhausted as she was, his unease at her touch was practically bright enough to burn her. Aerand allowed herself something close to a smirk. That was the closest to thanks she could expect from the captain or any of the troopers around her.
‘Thank you,’ she allowed herself to say. Let the lad hate her if he must – let them all hate her as much as the heretics behind them – but they’d arrive in Providence alive thanks to her. And Sergeant Raniais Maltia.
A burst of las-fire echoed from the mist precious few yards away, and dark shadows flitted between the scattered twists of corpsewood groves. Vyse’s vox-bead crackled and Sergeant Maltia’s voice barked something Aerand was far too exhausted to decipher.
Emperor bless that trooper. Trailing the main body like the razor-sharp tail of a bovarc, Sergeant Maltia and her single squad of heavies had done nearly as much to save Secundus Company as Aerand herself.
And it showed.
Slowly, the sergeant slogged out of the mist, dirt and sweat plastering her short hair to her face beneath the shadow of her battered helmet. The dark char of a deflected las-bolt streaked across the armour just over the woman’s left brow, and the chestplate of her flak armour was studded with half a dozen autopistol rounds. She limped slightly on her left leg, which oozed a thin trail of crimson into the dark water.
There were no soldiers in all the galaxy to match Cadian shock troopers, but it appeared their enemy were no amateurs at war, either.
‘At least a company trails us,’ Maltia barked, jogging double time to catch Captain Vyse. ‘I don’t have a clue how the hell they made up that distance after we knocked them back just an hour ago.’
Vyse grunted. ‘Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they have another dozen platoons pouring in from nearby. Maybe they have transports out there that we don’t even know about. Our intelligence has always been precariously thin, and it’s next to non-existent now that the whole regiment is holed up in Providence.’
The woman cursed and cycled her autogun absent-mindedly, then spat into the water, the iridescent shimmer of residue from a cheeked stimm-lozenge drifting out in a small ring.
‘At this point I don’t really care how many they have on our tail. Only one question that matters.’
‘Will they beat us there?’
Vyse nodded.
A glimmer of pride blossomed in Aerand. Despite the chilly reception from Secundus Company, these had been her soldiers once, and they had grown into capable leaders in her absence. She was not arrogant enough to believe that evolution had anything to do with her, but it was good to be back in the company of tacticians.
‘Take your squad and push east with Lieutenant Nalus,’ Vyse said. ‘Tell him to hit and fall back like we’ve been doing the whole way.’
It would have been one thing for the Witchbringer’s forces to engulf them hours ago in the midst of Visage’s wilds. The outcome of that assault would have been a complete decimation of Secundus Company, isolated and alone without reinforcements for miles. But the Cadians would have made the Traitor Guard and witches pay for every single trooper’s life, and they knew it.
Better instead to pursue the Cadians doggedly for a dozen miles, then cut off the fleeing soldiers when they were exhausted and spent. If the Witchbringer’s force flanking them was allowed to eclipse Secundus Company, they merely had to stall the main body long enough for the rest of the heretic army to descend upon them like a hammer.
‘Yes, sir,’ Maltia replied. ‘We’ll do it just like on Prost. Lieutenant Archibald Nalus and Sergeant Raniais Maltia. The heroes of Visage, I can see it now.’
The entire manoeuvre was a gamble on their enemy’s part – move too slowly and the Witchbringer would lose his quarry altogether – but one that any self-respecting commander would gladly make. Heroism aside, when given the choice between a sure and bloody conflict or the possibility of a clean slaughter, the wise soldier always chose the latter. Heroic losses might win individual battles, but they almost inevitably lost long wars.
‘Forget the jokes, Maltia. I don’t need any martyrs. Tell Nalus I’d rather put his troopers’ names in the supply log than the regimental honour roll. In fact, tell him that if he gets himself killed, I’ll put him in for court martial rather than a posthumous medal. I think that should adequately convey my intent.’
‘Will do, sir,’ Sergeant Maltia replied with a smirk, then turned to limp back into the mist.
‘On second thoughts,’ Vyse called after her, ‘that goes doubly true for you, sergeant. Get yourself killed and I’ll sift through the corpses myself, just so I can put another through your skull for desertion.’
The captain turned towards Corwyn and sighed. ‘I swear to the Emperor’s boots themselves, that trooper is trying harder to get herself killed than the enemy is trying to kill her.’
Corwyn chuckled darkly and glanced towards Aerand. ‘I seem to remember a pair of young lieutenants with a similar penchant for gallantry, sir.’
Vyse frowned at the implication, and Aerand nearly opened her mouth to protest, before an uneasy energy suddenly enveloped her.
If not for the young trooper supporting her, she might have fallen, a sudden weight in the air around her. Instantly, she threw up what paltry mental defences she retained, but found no psychic assault rising up against her. Even so, the skin on her arms rose in gooseflesh, each breath laced with the cloying flavour of burnt flesh. Rapidly, she pushed her mind out with what little psionic energy she retained. Far enough to glimpse the souls around her and the lead elements of Secundus Company moving forward through the mist.
She had not realised just how far they had fallen behind the remainder of the company, but where the Cadian vanguard should have already been nearing the outermost of Providence’s sea walls, they had instead clustered along a narrow strip of land hardly more than half a mile away. Aerand pushed her mind farther, her grip on the psychic world blurring, but found no sign of any force blocking their path. No signatures of fire-bright souls lacing the dark, misty fabric of the immaterium.
But just beyond the cluster of Secundus Company, splitting the path between the Cadians and Providence itself, the dark surface of the warp was boiling. Aerand’s grip on the empyrean flickered and then faltered before she could see whatever was trying to emerge from that churn.
‘Move,’ she gasped, leaning heavily on the trooper beside her. ‘We need to move.’
In the distance, the first scream filtered back through the mist.
‘Was a dead man’s hand, or I’m the Arch-traitor himself,’ the trooper remarked grimly. He wore a corporal’s chevrons, though Aerand did not remember his face. ‘You know me, sergeant. I don’t spin tales.’
‘I know, Pashta,’ Corwyn mumbled, throwing an uneasy glance Captain Vyse’s way.
The woman muttered a curse under her breath. ‘You know that’s nonsense, don’t you?’
‘I know, sir,’ Pashta replied. ‘But there isn’t any other way to describe it. Trooper Inset stepped into the water, then an arm reached up and pulled him under, plain as that.’
‘And you’re certain it was a corpse’s arm?’
Pashta shrugged. ‘No, not at first. Not until another one did the same thing to Johanns. Caught part of the face of that one, desiccated and bloated. Looked like it had been under the water for the better part of the decade.’
Vyse simply grunted, but Aerand immediately thought back to the body she’d seen pinned beneath the roots of a corpsewood tree, oddly preserved by the acrid, alkaline water of Visage’s sea. If she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn that the strange, twisted plant had been feeding on some part of the corpse, like an arachnid on a captured insect.
‘Stranger things, captain,’ she mumbled slowly, her mind struggling to keep up with new facts in its exhausted state. For the witches behind them to have truly summoned corpses from the bottom of that sea would be an act of almost unthinkable psychic power. It would be easy enough, on the other hand, for a high-strung soldier to mistake the grasping tendrils of a corpsewood tree for a limb of one of the deceased pinned beneath it.
Aerand glanced up at the wall of white behind Corporal Pashta. If the troopers of the 900th had feared Visage’s mists before, they now held a special flavour of dread. A wall of impenetrable white vapour had coalesced between the detached remnants of Secundus Company and the settlement of Providence, at least several hundred yards wide and Throne only knew how deep. Beyond the margin of its clearly demarcated border, her vision, both physical and psionic, failed completely.
Clearly, the mists had been summoned to delay Secundus Company’s passage. The anvil against which the Witchbringer’s forces would hammer them. But if the marsh priests in his retinue were truly powerful enough to reanimate the dead, then why go through such a roundabout ordeal? Throne knew Aerand could no longer put up any resistance. Why not simply shatter the minds within each trooper’s skull?
‘It’s another illusion,’ she said. ‘It has to be. If they had the skill to raise corpses there would be no point in the effort. They could smite us directly with half the exertion, and I have nothing left within me to stop them.’
Vyse’s face knotted at the admission, and Corporal Pashta shrugged. For his part, the trooper was handling the situation with remarkable composure. Perhaps the fact that at least a dozen other troopers had witnessed the event had saved him the second terror of thinking himself mad.
‘Wouldn’t know anything about that, lord psyker,’ he replied. ‘But I’ve put enough heretics in the ground to tell a corpse from the living.’
With a wave of her hand, Captain Vyse dismissed the corporal.
‘An illusion,’ Aerand repeated. ‘I promise you that.’
‘Corpse or not, two of my troopers were drowned. I’d prefer not to march the entire company into the same fate.’
As she spoke, Corwyn rose from a knee and stepped towards the seething wall of white vapour separating Secundus Company from Providence. A hundred soldiers and half a dozen Sentinels massed on a narrow strip of land just before the point where the mist thickened abruptly. The old sergeant stepped up to that border and reached his hand into the fog.
A brief look of anxiety crossed his weathered, scarred face, then one of almost surprised relief when nothing reached out of the mist to grasp him. He withdrew his arm, thick beads of dew coalescing and dripping from his gauntlet.
‘It’s wet,’ he muttered matter-of-factly. A painfully obvious assertion, perhaps, but one that any soldier immediately realised was worth stating. Providence’s walls lay less than a mile away, but it would be a miserable, cold slog through that mist, any other threats set to the side.
Aerand threw her weary mind against the barrier one final time, only to be unceremoniously pushed away. As she closed her eyes, a hundred souls blazed brightly on the fabric of the empyrean around her, the empty earth beyond them arrayed in muted, rough architecture. But past the wall of mist behind her, the world simply vanished, as if the space itself had been removed from the landscape of the empyrean, yet churned with the immaterium’s energy all the same. She shivered at the odd, disconjugate sensation. As if the space were dead to the warp, yet bursting with its energy at the same time.
