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Arcady Pride – Extract

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ARCADY PRIDE

Justin D Hill

It had been three days since the Cadians had stormed Traitor Rock. The ruins of Crannog Mons still burnt as distant salvos carried across the island: the Commissariat were working their way through the penal pens. Mass executions would last days. Death was the toll for heresy.

In recognition of their role in the victory, the Cadian 101st had been assigned garrison duties within the old palace district. At the crown of the crag, the palace itself had been reduced to marble dust and rubble. It had been an easy target for Imperial gunners. In the streets ringing it, there was barely a wall still standing.

Every hab, bunker and magazine had been disfigured by bombardment. The walled mansions and upmarket dwellings had been ground down to their foundations. Over it all hung an unhealthy stench of fyceline fumes, rockcrete dust, ash, and the putrid aroma of rotting corpses. The whole district had the air of a leprous patient poised upon the brink of death as the bone-weary Cadians picked their way through the rubble, seeking rest, shelter or blessed oblivion.

The dead weight of battle weighed each of them down: lost comrades; the lives they had seen taken; the knowledge that they had been spared and would fight once more, on another world, against other foes of the God-Emperor.

Some Cadians found corners in which to sleep or tend their wounds, sitting alone, hollow eyes staring into space. A few could not stay still, distracting themselves in the broken remains of lavish homes. A market sprang up where rations could be swapped for all manner of miscellany: golden trinkets, pocket chronos pulled from the corpses of the dead, lho-stubs in ornately carved bone cases, and miniature porcelain cameos of Imperial saints, scratched and dusty from the rubble.

But Minka did not need trinkets. She needed a drink.

Blanchez had said she’d found an old officers’ boarding lodge, and she led the little band – Minka, Yedrin and Jaromir – through the heaped rubble to the spot halfway down the lower circuits.

‘This is it,’ Blanchez said as they stopped in the cratered street.

Minka looked up. A gloomy edifice rose from the shattered rockcrete, loophole windows and revetments dark, a bushy mop of matted flaywire clinging to its circuit wall. The eastern side had been hit with an Earthshaker shell. Maybe two, it was hard to tell. There was a gaping hole into the floors above. A metal-framed cot hung out into open air, a Munitorum-issue bedsheet flapping in the evening breeze, and rockcrete blocks as big as tanks were embedded into the rubble.

‘This one?’ she asked.

Blanchez swung her sniper rifle over her back. ‘Yes, sir.’

Minka turned to check the ruined street as another salvo of distant gunfire echoed through the buildings. Yedrin put his foot onto the base of the slope and pushed himself up, but the rubble was so unstable that it slid towards him. He skipped back as rocks and dust tumbled down.

Minka had already gone around the east side of the hab.

Jaromir wandered after her, lascarbine in hand, while Blanchez waited for Yedrin as he tried again, with just as little success.

‘Not that way,’ he concluded. Blanchez gave him a look as he slid back to the street and dusted himself down.

Minka tried climbing up the side of a halftrack. She used the knotted cargo webbing to pull herself onto the carriage. The truck bed was piled with heaps of rotting sacking and coils of grease-stained ratchet straps. There were handholds welded onto the back of the beaten-up cabin. She clambered up, using one foot to test the rusted roof. It creaked but held long enough for her to move across and leap and catch the fractured first floor opening.

Minka hung for a moment, hands grasping for purchase, and then pulled herself through.

‘After you,’ Jaromir said to Yedrin as he and Blanchez joined them.

The younger man took in a quick breath and climbed onto the halftrack’s roof, eyes fixed on his sergeant, who stood in the opening with a hand outstretched to him, an expression on her face that said: Jump!

Yedrin had never liked heights, but he was a shock trooper now. He threw himself forward, catching hold of Minka’s hand, and she dragged him up.

‘Thanks,’ he said, dusting himself down as Blanchez followed.

Jaromir came last. The cabin roof creaked beneath his weight, and he wasted no time. As he pushed off, one foot went through the rusting panel and he fell short, fingers scrabbling on the rockcrete casing.

Minka and Yedrin caught his webbing, and took his weight for a moment, and then they hauled him up.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, pulling the torn cloth back over his leg, but there was a long scratch leaking blood down his shin.

‘Sure?’ Minka said.

The big man smiled. ‘Yeah. Nothing a shot of stimm won’t heal.’

A steady sea breeze whistled through the cavities and broken casements as Minka led them inside. ‘I feel like I’ve been here before,’ she said.

Blanchez frowned, but from the look of concentration on Jaromir’s face, he was experiencing something similar. Yedrin looked about as well. There was something familiar about this place.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘There was a bastion like this where I grew up.’

Jaromir nodded. ‘It feels like Cadia.’

The image came back to Minka – the lesser bastions along the Western Habs were built to this same pattern. The incongruence knocked her back for a moment. On Cadia, the weight of centuries had hung upon those walls: battle honours for ancient regiments; honour scrolls; brass plaques listing victories or the dead; age-frayed standards; laslocks with verdigris staining the veteran, antiquated metalwork; framed cases of ancient medals won on distant planets. But here the walls were bare, and the rockcrete floor was scattered with discarded powercells, a pair of stained fatigues, balled up in the corner, and a heap of stale blankets.

Minka puffed her cheeks out.

‘Maybe this place was built by Cadian engineers,’ Yedrin said. ‘Back when Crannog Mons was established as a way station for the Cadian Gate.’

Blanchez’s face coloured. She’d been raised in the foetid guts of a sprawling muster world – a disease-ridden shanty of camp followers and generations of offspring and offcasts, leeching an existence from what trickled down from the distant Munitorum alcazars. Cadia had been just a rumour to her. And now it was gone, and she felt that lack like a shut and bolted doorway.

Minka led them through to the next chamber. A row of stained mattresses was lined up against the wall, looming over dishevelled piles of filthy bedding. The wall had been smashed, and it looked like someone had robbed the wiring all the way up to the ceiling.

She remembered how the Unnamed had used such cables during the Battle for Cadia. For a moment she saw the hanging corpses, set in lines all along Euphrates Street. She gave the hanging wires a wide berth, and as Jaromir followed her underneath, she said simply, ‘Careful.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Darren Tan.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-609-5

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