Fire Caste Read online

  It is the 41st millennium. 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 will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless Planetary Defence Forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  The Phaedran Commissariat

  Holt Iverson, Veteran Commissar

  Lomax, High Commissar

  Ysabel Reve, Commissar Cadet

  The Arkan Confederates

  Ensor Cutler, Colonel, 1st Company

  Skjoldis ‘Lady Raven’, Sanctioned Psyker/Norland Witch

  ‘Mister Frost’, The Colour Bearer/Norland Weraldur

  Elias Waite, Major, 2nd Company

  Jon Milton Machen, Captain, 3rd Company

  Ambrose Templeton, Captain, 4th Company

  Hardin Vendrake, Captain, Silverstorm Sentinel Cavalry

  Pericles Quint, Lieutenant, Silverstorm Sentinel Cavalry

  Beauregard Van Hal, Silverstorm Sentinel Cavalry

  Willis Calhoun, Sergeant, Dustsnake Squad

  Claiborne Roach, Greyback Trooper, Dustsnake Squad

  Gordy Boone, Greyback Trooper, Dustsnake Squad

  Kletus Modine, Greyback Trooper, Dustsnake Squad

  Jakob Dix, Greyback Trooper, Dustsnake Squad

  Obadiah Pope, Greyback Trooper, Dustsnake Squad

  Audie Joyce, Greencap Rookie, Dustsnake Squad

  Cort Toomy, Greyback Sniper, Dustsnake Squad

  Jaques Valance, Scout, 3rd Company

  The Lethean Penitents

  Yosiv Gurdjief, Penitent Confessor

  Vyodor Karjalan, Admiral

  Zemyon Rudyk, Penitent Commissar Cadet

  Csanad Vaskó, Corsair Zabaton

  The 33rd Verzante Skyshadows

  Jaime Hernandez Garrido, Pilot

  Guido Gonzalo Ortega, Co-Pilot

  The Verzante Konquistadores

  Ricardo Alvarez, Corporal

  Cristobal Olim, Aristocrat Officer

  The Unquiet Dead

  Nathaniel Bierce, Commissar, deceased

  Detlef Niemand, Commissar, deceased

  Number 27, Unknown Soldier, deceased

  The Tau

  Shas’el Aabal, Fire Warrior Commander

  Shas’ui Jhi’kaara, Pathfinder

  Por’o Dal’yth Seishin, Water Caste Ambassador

  Dolorosa Topaz – Thunderground?

  And so we come to it. Well I’ll tell you what I know, but be warned that my mind may wander. The fever has a hold on me once again and I’m freezing and burning up by turns. As I write I can see my phantoms stalking from the emerald shadows, staking their claim on the sins of my past. My phantoms? Oh, there are three, standing shoulder to shoulder in mute condemnation of my failings. To the right is Old Man Bierce, inhumanly tall in his spotless black storm coat, pinning me with that raptor’s glare. To the left is Commissar Niemand, pale and shrunken with the revelation of his own eternally unravelling entrails, trapped forever in the moment when I turned my back on him. And at the centre, always at the centre, stands Number 27, her three immaculate, dead eyes the greatest misery and mystery of them all.

  Fever dreams or visions? I doubt it matters. Whatever they are, they’ve come to bear witness when I walk my Thunderground. No, don’t concern yourself with the expression. It’s just an old myth from my home world. We Arkan are a strange breed and there are some things even the schola progenium couldn’t drum out of me. The Imperium took me away from my home long ago, but it couldn’t take my home away from me. Sometimes blood runs deeper than faith.

  But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. The Thunderground has called to me and if I don’t return, and it falls to you to take my place, you’ll need facts. You’ll need to understand the true nature of your enemy. Most importantly you’ll need to understand that you face a twofold beast.

  First there’s the foe you’ve travelled across the stars to destroy: an unholy coalition of rebels and aliens who’ll butcher your men with anything from a bow to a burst cannon. The tau are behind it all of course. You’ve read the Tactica manuals so you’ll already know how these xenos operate. On this world they call their movement ‘the Concordance’, but don’t dignify them with the name. You’ll find the same old pattern of infiltration and corruption, so just call them blueskin bastards and purge them as best you can.

  Their leader calls himself Commander Wintertide – an irony on a planet where winter is just a myth – but then Wintertide himself sometimes seems little more than a myth. He casts a long shadow, but you’ll never actually see him. Well, I plan to put his myth to the test. If it can be done I’m going to find him and kill him.

  But let me tell you about your other enemy, the spirit killer who’ll steal away your troops before they even face the rebels. For men like you and I, pledged to put the steel in their spines and the fire in their hearts, She’s the true enemy here. Of course I’m talking of Phaedra Herself, this cesspit planet we’ve come to liberate or conquer or cleanse. Sometimes I forget which it is. It’s been a long war.

  Phaedra: too lazy to be a death world, too bitter to be anything else. While She can’t muster the riot of murderous beasts or geological torments of a true death world, you mustn’t underestimate Her. She’ll do Her killing slowly – stealthy but steady. And yes, I do mean ‘She’. All the troops know it, although High Command denies it. Survive long enough and you’ll know it too. Just as you’ll know She’s corrupt to Her mouldering, waterlogged core, no matter what the Ecclesiarchy assessors say. You’ll know it in the mist and the rain and the creeping damp that will be your constant companions here, but most of all you’ll know it in Her jungles.

  You see, you’ve come to a water world and found a grey-green hell like no other. The oceans of Phaedra are choked with islands and in turn the islands are overrun with a wildfire cancer of vegetation – a morass of stinking kelp, strangling vines and towering fungal cathedrals. Worse still, the islands themselves are alive. Just look beneath the waterline and you’ll see them breathing and pulsing. The biologis tech-priests say it’s some kind of coral – a minor, mindless blasphemy of xenos diversity. They say there’s no taint to it, but I’ve heard the bitter blood music beating through this world and I say they’re fools.

  And so you’ve had your warn
ing and my duty to you is done. Time is pressing and I must make my final preparations. Didn’t I tell you there’s a storm coming? It won’t be one of Phaedra’s killer typhoons, but it’ll be a big one all the same. I can taste it in the angry, electric air. And they can taste it too, the rats hiding in the skins of my charges and turning brave men sour. My charges? Oh, they were called the Verzante Konquistadores back when they were still a regiment unbroken by Phaedra’s wiles. Now they’re little more than relics left to rot. Not unlike myself. Perhaps that’s why fate has led me to them. And perhaps that’s why I still care enough to try and save them. They were never the finest troops in the Imperial Guard, but they’re not beyond redemption even now.

  There are seven in particular whose struggles have been piteous and an eighth beyond pity. I’ve watched them teeter on the brink of heresy, held back by some last vestige of honour or faith or perhaps simple fear. But now the storm will kindle an unholy fire in their hearts and give them that final push. I have to be there for them.

  You are right – I have been weak. Doubtless my old mentor Bierce would tell me an example was required long ago, but I’m as broken as everything else in this meat-grinder war. I’ve not had the courage to administer the Emperor’s Justice since the debacle of Indigo Gorge and Number 27. Perhaps if I’d had Bierce’s fire or Niemand’s ice and was a finer exemplar of our special brotherhood, things would be different now and these Guardsmen wouldn’t have strayed so far, but Bierce and Niemand are long dead and I’m the last one left to hold the line.

  The traitors think I’m fever-blind, but I’ve caught their sly whispers and know the truth of it. Tonight they’ll run and I’ll be waiting.

  Iverson’s Journal

  It was never truly dark in the Mire. By day the jealous canopy of the trees strangled the sunlight into a trickle, drowning the jungle in murk. By night the swarming fungi awoke, flooding the grottos and glades with bioluminescence, transforming the morass into a pungent wonderland. It was a world of rival twilights, but still the ghosts came out at night.

  They bled from the tangled skein of the jungle and hovered furtively at the edge of the clearing. There were seven, every one an emaciated shadow in rotting fatigues. In the bilious light their khaki uniforms were a patchwork purple and their eyes seemed to glitter with indigo fire. Crouching at the tree line they scanned the clearing, battered lasrifles flitting about warily. With a flick of the wrist from the leader they dissolved into two teams and fanned out along the perimeter. Motionless, the leader kept watch on the ruin crouched at the centre of the glade.

  The rain had turned hard and heavy, battering through the vault of the jungle and raising streamers of mist, but the pale dome of the temple glowed through the murk. It was typical of the indigenous architecture. Deprived of stone, the ancient Phaedrans had carved their buildings from coral, imbuing them with a globular, organic look that was repellent to Imperial eyes. The central cupola had collapsed and the walls were honeycombed with fissures, but there was no trace of the weeds or creeper vines that preyed on more wholesome relics. A circle of barren ground radiated from the temple, holding the jungle at bay for some ten metres or so. It was a pattern played out by a myriad dead temples across the planet. The mystery fascinated the Mechanicus priests, but to Ignatz Cabeza it was just another sign of this world’s fundamental wrongness.

  The sergeant was a wiry cadaver of a man, his features moulded into a death mask by a paste of grey mud. His eyes gleamed in the hollows of the camouflage, the irises iridescent with the bloom of a Glory fugue, but Cabeza was no degenerate. He reviled most of Phaedra’s fungal narcotics, but the Glory was different, its spores granting that razorwire sharpness a warrior sometimes found in the heat of battle. Of course the Glory was forbidden, but deep in the Mire, far from the vigilant eyes of the priests and commissars, a man made his own laws. Uneasily his thoughts drifted to Iverson, the wreck of a commissar who’d joined his regiment a month back. The man had presided over the remnants of the 6th Tempest like a carrion bird shadowing a dying man. And of course the 6th was dying.

  The fall of Cabeza’s regiment was a slow burning shame in his heart. They were Verzante, Konquistadores of the Galleon Meridian, Guardsmen of the God-Emperor and they had exulted in this campaign! Whipped into a fervour by Aguilla de Caravajal, the holy Water Dragon of the 6th Tempest, they had joined the crusade to Phaedra joyfully, eager to brand their name upon this heathen world. Instead they had drowned in its filth.

  How long had it been? Three years? Four? Caravajal himself had fallen in the second year, raving and incontinent with blood, unravelled from within by a borefly infestation. Inevitably the regiment had unravelled in his wake, a thousand proud Konquistadores fading to a few hundred shadows. Tactically marginal, they had been shunted off to this worthless island crawling with xenos-tainted savages. Dolorosa Topaz – a backwater corner of the war where victory was as impossible as it was irrelevant. And here they were forgotten. Almost.

  Long months after their exile began, an Imperial gunboat had appeared on the horizon. The Verzante gathered on the shore and Velasquez, the veteran capitán who’d held them together by sheer force of will, dared to make a show of hope, but the boat had carried neither reinforcements nor supplies, just a scarecrow in black.

  There had been no mistaking the figure standing in the prow of the approaching boat. Strikingly tall and straight in his leather storm coat, his square-jawed face shadowed by a high peaked cap, he was a commissar cut in the classic mould. Watching him, Cabeza had shuddered. Though the 6th had lost both its disciplinary officers long ago, they’d left him with plenty of scars to remember them by. Not that he held it against them. He’d been a rowdy dog until the commissars had whipped him into shape. Luckily he’d been a quick learner, unlike his clan brother Greko, who’d wound up hanging by his heels in the parade ground as an example to the new recruits. After that they’d all been quick learners. And so Cabeza had wondered what this new tyrant would teach them.

  But when the commissar stepped from the boat Cabeza had seen the truth of him. The newcomer’s cap was tattered and his leather coat was more grey than black, its edges encrusted with a rime of mould. Up close he’d been pallid and unshaven, his grey hair hanging well below the shoulders. He was probably no more than forty-five, but already old with something that cut deeper than age. Worse still was the telltale lattice of a spidervine burn inscribed into his face. Only a blind man or a man too ignorant to see could have taken such a wound. Perhaps it had happened a lifetime ago, back in the commissar’s first tour of the Mire, but to Cabeza the scar still marked him out as a fool.

  Phaedra has no mercy for fools…

  The newcomer’s faded blue eyes had skimmed the Konquistadores briefly. Distant. Disinterested. ‘Iverson’, he’d said. Then he’d stalked past them to claim a tent.

  Commissar Iverson’s tenure continued as it had begun. Aloof and indifferent, he had kept to his tent or wandered the jungle alone, scribbling away in his battered leather journal. Sometimes he talked to himself or to something in the shadows only he could see. Like a man possessed. And maybe he was. Cabeza had seen stranger things in his time. In any case Iverson had caught the fever in his second week and hadn’t left his tent since. He was just another wreck among so many. An irrelevance… Cabeza had believed it until he’d glimpsed the commissar watching the camp from the shadows of his tent. And recently he’d caught Iverson’s fever-bright eyes looking directly at him. Almost as if he knew the treachery in Ignatz Cabeza’s heart...

  Something battered through the foliage behind the sergeant. He scowled as the sour-sweet stench of zoma juice hit him. Zoma! Now there was a true high road to oblivion, exactly the kind of fool’s glow that Cabeza despised. Almost as much as he despised the man who lumbered up alongside him. Cristobal Olim had rubbed the camouflage away from his pasty face, leaving it luminous in the fungal light.

  ‘I told you to wait, señor,’ Cabeza
hissed.

  ‘It’s raining. The water was pooling in my boots,’ there was a strident whine to Olim’s voice that set Cabeza’s teeth on edge. The few he still had left. ‘Besides you’ve found our objective, sergeant!’ Olim stepped forward and peered at the temple, his eyes bleary with zoma. ‘Oh yes, you’ve most definitely found it. I knew my faith in you wasn’t misplaced!’

  Olim took another step forward and stumbled, his feet skittering on the rain-slick coral. Cabeza let him fall, keeping his attention on his comrades as they completed their sortie and converged across the clearing. Corporal Alvarez waved him the all clear – no threats on the periphery of the zone. That just left the temple itself. Cabeza signalled the advance.

  Olim was still slithering about on the ground, whimpering as he tried to find purchase on the coral. Cabeza hauled him up with one hand, keeping his lasrifle steady with the other.

  ‘On your feet, señor,’ Cabeza said. ‘I don’t want to lose you.’

  Olim clutched at his arm, his tone suddenly sly, ‘No, you don’t sergeant. You really don’t. Because I’m the one they want, remember. I’m the officer here!’

  Cabeza looked at him. The man’s attempt at cunning was pathetic. Although the Mire had sucked the meat out of him Olim still looked fat. How was that even possible? Staring at that saggy sponge of a face, with its bulging eyes and delicate, zoma-stained lips, Cabeza felt an almost physical need for violence. He hated Olim. They all did. The fat aristo was responsible for the massacre of Capitán Velasquez and the other commanders. He’d been the duty officer on the night when a dead-eyed native had walked into camp with tales of a rebel supply dump. Hungry for approval, Olim had led the native straight to the command tent, where the infiltrator had triggered the melta bomb wired into his guts. Velasquez and the other officers had died instantly, but in a twist of fate Olim had escaped untouched. As the only surviving officer, he’d inherited command and carried the 6th Tempest into its final death spiral. The man was a travesty.