The Cost of Command Read online

  The Cost of Command

  Sandy Mitchell

  This wasn’t the first time Lanthus had duelled in the arena; the Astral Knights were dour by temperament, even for heirs of Dorn, and guarded their honour jealously. Even the most trivial of disagreements could easily escalate to the point where the symbolic shedding of blood seemed the simplest way to determine who was in the right. But never before had he entered the ring as a sergeant, let alone one whose judgement had been called into question. Most of the faces of the spectators in the tiered seats were hostile, resentful, unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  This didn’t surprise him. Aldwyn, his antagonist, was liked and respected by many of the battle-brothers in the wider company, not just those of their own squad, while Lanthus had always preferred to hone his skills and piety without the distractions of companionship. In this matter of honour, he stood alone. The Chapter Master, gazing down from his crystal throne opposite the ampitheatre’s entrance, had a neutral expression, more pensive than judgemental. Master Amhrad hardly ever attended an affair of honour in person, and Lanthus wondered why this relatively minor matter merited his attention: perhaps it was a good omen.

  Even if it wasn’t, his conscience was clear. The mission always came first. His decision had been the right one.

  He stepped forward onto the carpet of tiny crystals, each smaller than a grain of sand, glittering crimson in the dull ember glow of their home world’s sun. The only garment he wore was the duelling tunic tradition demanded, its plain white fabric dyed the colour of blood by the glowering Eye of Obsidia, forever nailed to the horizon by the planet’s tidally locked rotation.

  Aldwyn approached from the opposite side of the arena, his face twisting with anger as Lanthus nodded a formal greeting. Good. Angry men made mistakes. Lanthus had killed enough of them to know that. The advantage was his.

  ‘Dorn and the Emperor watch over you both,’ Master Amhrad said levelly, the ritual phrase as old as the Chapter itself. ‘May they guide your hands and shards swiftly to the truth.’

  ‘By Dorn and the Emperor,’ Lanthus responded by rote, drawing his soul shard from its scabbard. Every Astral Knight carried one of the glittering blades, each as unique as its owner, and would as soon be parted from it as from his progenoid gland. The first time every initiate wore power armour was the day he went out alone, to scour the endless plains around the Obsidian Vaults until one of the millions of crystals littering the landscape called out to him; honed carefully into a razor-sharp blade, mounted in a hand-crafted hilt, the soul shard became permeated with the essence of the man who created and carried it.

  ‘By Dorn and the Emperor,’ Aldwyn said, beginning an instant later, and eliding the first word to finish the ritual phrase at the same time as Lanthus.

  ‘To the drawing of blood,’ Lanthus said, as he had done at the beginning of every previous duel, expecting the ritual acknowledgement he had always heard. But Aldwyn shook his head, his expression as venomous as an ork’s.

  ‘To the death,’ he said.

  Although his face remained neutral, the Chapter Master seemed as surprised as Lanthus. Nevertheless, after a moment’s reflection, his head inclined in the briefest of nods. ‘Is this acceptable to you, Brother Lanthus?’ he asked.

  ‘It is.’ In truth, there was no other answer Lanthus could have given. To refuse would have smacked of cowardice, or a trace of doubt in the rightness of his cause. But he was shaken, nevertheless, by the depth of Aldwyn’s hatred. To take the life of a battle-brother was almost unimaginable, a duel to the death by mutual agreement the only way in which it could be done without incurring centuries of penitential exile. Even then, the survivor would bear an ineradicable stain on his honour for the rest of his life.

  The Chapter Master nodded. ‘Then you may commence,’ he said levelly, taking refuge from any disquiet he might feel in the time-sanctified ritual.

  Lanthus was cautious to begin with, holding back, waiting for his opponent to make the first move. Aldwyn, he knew, was impulsive, and the anger driving him on would exacerbate that.

  There. A faint shifting of Aldwyn’s centre of mass betrayed his intention a fraction of a second before he moved, striking out with a speed and power no mortal man could have evaded or withstood. Lanthus was ready for him, though, and pivoted aside on his back foot, letting the blow glide smoothly past, striking down with his elbow at the suddenly exposed base of Aldwyn’s skull as he overextended himself.

  For a moment he hoped he could put an end to it here and now, that Aldwyn would drop, stunned, to the ground at his feet and allow him to escape the taint of fratricide, but his opponent anticipated the blow. He ducked beneath it, robbing the strike of much of its power, bringing himself back on balance as he did so. Then Aldwyn drove suddenly forward, his reinforced cranium slamming into the sergeant’s sternum. Lanthus barely had time to pull back, riding the blow intended to drive the air from his lungs, and blocking the follow up strike from Aldwyn’s shard with a hard deflection, his forearm cutting down like the edge of a sword blade to impact heavily with Aldwyn’s, pushing his arm aside with only a fraction of a second to spare.

  The razor-edged chunk of obsidian in Aldwyn’s hand flickered past his ribcage, missing by millimetres, and the two combatants drew apart, regaining both balance and breath, regarding one another warily.

  Only the hand of the Emperor had saved Summerfall from complete annihilation. If Third Company’s battle-barge hadn’t passed close enough to the beleaguered system to pick up the babble of overlapping distress calls on their homeward pilgrimage from the Medusa Veil campaign, the ork migration would have overrun it long before the far-flung forces of the Imperium could have responded. But the Astral Knights had heard, and been blessed by a swiftly-flowing warp current through the local cluster, which the Chaplains agreed had been another unmistakable sign of divine favour.

  So now Lanthus was prowling through the ruins of what had once been the primary industrial zone of Hive Bessemer, the rest of Squad Caromort hard on his heels. The greenskins had been quick to plunder the abandoned manufactories, and Captain Galad had decreed that the steady flow of machinery and raw materials to the orkish forges would cease today. Whatever it took.

  ‘Wait,’ Lanthus said, holding up a hand, although he knew his battle-brothers could see him clearly enough in their helmet displays. For that matter, even though he was on point, he knew precisely where all of them were in the wilderness of rubble behind him, their positions pinpointed by blue and gold icons, echoing the colours of their armour, in the tactical overlay. He swept through the full range of sensory enhancements, looking for heat sources, vibration, electrical activity. ‘I’m reading movement.’

  ‘The target?’ That was Aldwyn, of course, Lanthus would have recognised the edge of impatience in the speaker’s voice even if his helmet spirits hadn’t tagged the transmission with his battle-brother’s identity code.

  ‘Probably.’ Lanthus moved on, cresting the broken wall of what had once been a dormitory block, heedless of the twelve metre drop at his feet. He was looking out across a wide carriageway, littered with burnt-out cargo haulers, but most of the wrecks were in the lanes lining the edges, leaving the centre ones unimpeded. Which could mean only one thing. ‘The road’s in regular use.’

  ‘Can you confirm the contact?’ Sergeant Caromort asked.

  ‘Confirmed.’ The icons resolved, still fuzzy with distance, the auspex returns erratic through the obscuring ruins and distorted by the plumes of wind-driven ash gusting around what remained of the streets. But they were enough for him to be certain. ‘Multiple contacts, fast-moving, following the road. Numbers indetermi
nate.’ He hardly needed the helmet display, the plume of dust and noxious exhausts typical of orkish vehicles already clear in the distance. ‘We’ve got about seven minutes to set the ambush.’

  ‘More than enough time,’ Aldwyn opined, bounding forward to join him, his bolter raised. ‘It’s only a handful of gretchin scavengers.’

  ‘We can’t be sure of that yet,’ Lanthus cautioned, but before he finished speaking, Aldwyn had already gone, leaping out into the void without hesitation, or the most cursory of glances towards the onrushing horde.

  The rest of Combat Squad Two followed him without pause or hesitation, dashing past Lanthus like blue and gold comets, jumping lithely to the carriageway below. The knee joints of their armour flexed as they hit the ground, easily absorbing an impact which would have driven the leg bones of a mortal man up though their ribcage, and they continued running the moment they found a purchase on the cracked and shell-pocked rockcrete. In a handful of heartbeats all had taken cover on the far side of the road, within the gutted shells of the shattered foundries, or dug in behind one or other of the wrecked and rusting vehicles.

  A moment later Combat Squad One, Lanthus’ own subunit, appeared, under the command of Sergeant Caromort, and Lanthus raised a gauntlet in greeting.

  ‘Lanthus, Beves, stay here.’ The brother-sergeant’s golden faceplate turned to the two Space Marines. ‘Set up a firing position, and observe the enemy’s approach.’

  ‘By your command,’ Lanthus and Beves responded in unison. Beves carried the squad’s missile launcher, and was already hunkering down behind an outcrop of tumbled masonry, the heavy weapon unslung and seeking a target.

  ‘The rest with me,’ Caromort concluded, leading the way over the parapet.

  Lanthus glanced down, just in time to see the rest of Combat Squad One vanish into places of concealment on this side of the road. Good. When the greenskins appeared, they’d be neatly caught in the crossfire.

  ‘Coming into optimum range,’ he told Beves, who acknowledged tersely, his attention still centred on the heavy weapon’s sights. This was to be Beves’ first taste of action with Caromort’s squad: from time immemorial, the newest recruit to an Astral Knights tactical unit had always been assigned as the heavy weapons specialist. It made the best use of their recent experience as a Devastator, and allowed them time to grow used to the more flexible role they’d inherited. It also felt less like they were stepping into the gap left by a fallen comrade. They usually were, of course, but every Astral Knight took it for granted that their service to the Emperor would only end in one way. Their entire progenitor Chapter had been lost millennia before, and were still mourned by those who carried their genetic legacy in their progenoid glands: the only thing about dying that mattered to an Astral Knight was to make his final moments a testament to his faith in the Emperor, and the means to a victory in His name.

  By now, Lanthus could feel a tremor in the masonry beneath his feet, the vibration of dozens of vehicles travelling flat out – the only way the orks knew how to drive them. Had it not been for the audio filters in his helmet, he would already have been deafened by the noise of the badly tuned and barely maintained engines echoing from the surrounding rubble.

  Beves’ gauntleted finger tightened almost imperceptibly on the trigger.

  ‘Wait,’ Lanthus cautioned. ‘Wait…’ Beves would be concentrating entirely on the picture through his sights, but Lanthus had a better view of the battlefield. This was why Caromort had left him up here, in a superior vantage point. His helmet spirits were casting the data they were gathering directly to his hidden battle-brothers, letting them pick targets before they even became visible from where they’d set up their firing positions. He switched to a general voxcast. ‘Trucks, mostly, a few outriders. They’re not expecting trouble.’ He paused for a moment. ‘No more than orks usually do, anyway.’ It might look like a soft target, but an unarmed ork was a contradiction in terms. The vile creatures were aggression personified and it wouldn’t take them long to rally once they realised they were under attack.

  ‘Take the lead truck,’ Caromort voxed to Beves, ‘then the last one. Box them in.’

  ‘Acknowledged.’ Beves triggered his missile launcher.

  ‘Wait,’ Lanthus said, an instant too late, as the auspex images in his helmet display finally resolved. A quick glance was enough to confirm the new tactical picture, his enhanced sight piercing the haze of dust and promethium fumes surrounding the onrushing cluster of vehicles. ‘That’s not a supply convoy–’

  The rest of his words were drowned out by the explosion of Beves’ krak warhead against the side of the leading truck.

  The shot was a good one: the ramshackle vehicle slewed across the road, rolled, and came to rest upside down, a trickle of smoke leaking from the bodywork. A heartbeat later it was barged aside in a shower of sparks by the monstrous bulk of a heavily armoured battlewagon.

  In unison, the Astral Knights opened up from ambush, raking the still moving convoy with bolter fire. Greenskin drivers and gunners fell, trucks collided, but too many orks were scrambling from the wreckage, or retaliating with heavy weapons fire of their own.

  ‘Stop that battlewagon!’ Caromort commanded, and Beves sent a second rocket after it. The Emperor was clearly guiding his aim: the projectile must have struck an ammunition locker after penetrating the relatively weak top armour. A moment after it hit, the whole contraption exploded in a ball of greasy flame, the concussion jarring the rubble under Lanthus’ feet. A couple of trucks, following too closely, slammed into the burning wreckage and were instantly immolated in turn.

  With the road now blocked, the whole convoy ground to a halt, engines revving. A few of the drivers tried to back up, ramming those behind, spreading the turmoil. True to type, several of them began brawling over the issue, heedless of the Astral Knights bolter shells hissing about their ears.

  ‘Pick your targets,’ Caromort voxed calmly.

  Dozens of orks, over a hundred by Lanthus’ count, were pulling themselves clear of the wreckage, cohering into growing mobs, roaring with anger and bloodlust. Driven by rage, each group charged towards the Astral Knights, brandishing crudely fashioned axes and even more crudely fashioned guns. Instead of gretchin scavengers and a handful of orks to escort them, as the Astral Knights had expected, this was a warband on the move, racing to throw themselves into the fray against the Imperial warriors who were now pushing back what had, so recently, seemed an unstoppable advance across the war-ravaged continent. Which was fine with the Space Marines: so far as they were concerned, the greenskins might just as well die here instead.

  ‘Team Two, overlapping fire,’ Aldwyn voxed, punctuating his words with bursts of bolter fire which scythed down the front rank of blood-maddened greenskins howling towards him. The Space Marines on the far side of the road complied, laying down supporting fire for one another, making the best use of the cover they’d found. The tactic was always a sound one against orks. The brutish greenskins were so desperate to get into close combat that they would charge headlong into the most withering fire heedless of the cost.

  ‘Frag rounds,’ Lanthus instructed Beves. ‘Thin them out for our brothers on this side of the road.’

  ‘I need help,’ cut in Brother Prius, one of the Astral Knights who’d accompanied Caromort. Lanthus could see him from up here, backed against a crumbling wall, holding a horde of howling orks at bay with short, precise bolter bursts. The instant he paused to reload, they’d rush him, and in numbers too great even for a Space Marine to hold his own against. Lanthus estimated he had no more than seconds left before the fight below became a vicious hand-to-hand brawl, which could only have one end.

  But Beves was already switching loads, slapping a magazine of fragmentation warheads into his launcher. The first round burst among the orks threatening Prius, reducing the closest to a mist of ichor and pulverised flesh, while a blizzard of shrapnel
ripped its way through the others. Prius took advantage of the respite to reload, and disappeared into the wilderness of rubble, covering his retreat with carefully aimed shots at the handful of survivors too stupid or frenzied to back off. A moment later Lanthus caught sight of another flash of blue and gold in almost the same spot.

  ‘Kurtin’s with him,’ Lanthus reported. He turned, looking for some sign of Sergeant Caromort in the direction his icon indicated, feeling a flicker of foreboding as he did so. The battlewagon’s unexpected clearance of the first obstacle had carried the bulk of the convoy some way past the sergeant’s position, leaving him completely encircled by greenskin warriors.

  ‘Good.’ Caromort’s voice was grim, and it wasn’t hard to see why. His position was even worse than Prius’ had been, hemmed in by wrecked trucks and howling greenskins. His armour was pitted and seared by the relentless pounding of the ork guns, the sheer volume of impacting rounds ablating the thick ceramite that would normally have shrugged them off. The fact that many of their comrades were being felled by stray rounds and ricochets didn’t seem to inhibit the ork gunners at all, or deter the axe-wielders from pressing the attack as hard as they could. Caromort’s augmented blood was leaking from rents in his armour, hardening instantly as it met the air, and Lanthus felt a bitter chill; the sergeant must already be grievously wounded.

  Beves fired a frag round into the baying mob, then a second, but all it achieved was delaying the inevitable. Caromort had nowhere to go, and with his left leg already shattered would be unable to run even if there was. The tide of greenskins broke for a moment as the shrapnel scythed through them, then flowed back into the hole the explosions had punched in their ranks, their feet slipping in the viscera of the fallen, and the spreading pool of promethium gushing from the fuel tanks ruptured by the hail of razor-edged metal.

  ‘Team Two, assault formation,’ Aldwyn voxed. ‘We’re punching through to relieve the sergeant.’

  ‘Hold your position,’ Caromort snapped. ‘I can barely move. If you try it you’ll die too.’ Then his bolter fell silent, the last round gone from the magazine, and with a feral howl the mob of orks fell upon him. For a moment he disappeared, and Lanthus feared he’d seen the last of his commander; with carefully placed single shots he sniped at the struggling knot of greenskins in the centre of the maelstrom, hacking and slashing at the beleaguered warrior in an insensate frenzy, heedless of the wounds they were inflicting on one another in the process. Then Lanthus’ careful marksmanship thinned them out enough for Caromort to shrug the survivors off.