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Deathworlder – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

There is a particular smell to a dying world. It comes after the stench of rotten meat and decaying vegetation has faded away, after the acrid burn of a warhead or sulphurous smog has dissipated. It comes only when the immeasurably vast lifetime of a planet has shivered down to days, or hours or minutes, when the final clouds are clearing and when life is so scarce as to be inconsequential. It is a smell of ending, cold and clean. Of nothing.

Lazulai is ending, but it is not quite dead yet.

Major Wulf Khan looked out over the battlements of Cobalt Fortress, a smoking cheroot clamped between her teeth. Another dawn was breaking over this doomed planet and somehow, she was still here to see it. The noctis watch was coming to a close and she was making her final rounds.

The sky above looked like an abscess, purpled and engorged with the writhing mass of xenos that thronged the upper atmosphere. Khan was reminded of the Catachan vein-worm of her home world. The pitted flesh-wound where it laid its eggs would swell as the larvae grew, and discolour to the unhealthy hue of Lazulai’s skies. That parasite could be dug out with a knife. The tyranid infestation, which had reduced this world to a carcass, could not.

She slowly exhaled a plume of smoke. When her regiment had made planetfall, there had been great cities visible, built from the wealth of the gems mined on Lazulai. But this world had bred soft, indolent people who hadn’t realised the galaxy was at war. Who had themselves let in the aliens, and doomed their own planet. They deserved to die. It was a shame she and her troops would die with them.

The battlements of Cobalt Fortress zigzagged away into the weak morning light. For about a mile in each direction from where Khan stood, crenellations jutted like fangs along the battlements, with watchtowers rising every thirty yards. The fortress took its name from the great cobalt pits in the mountains at its roots, but the stronghold itself was built of something like black obsidian, wrought long ago by forgotten architects. When her regiment had arrived to join the fight, they’d been thousands strong, but the relentless attrition of the xenos had ground their number down to mere hundreds.

Three hundred feet below Khan’s viewpoint, the razed ground smoked, scorched after months of siege. Human and tyranid carcasses lay where they had fallen, heaped around the fortress for half a mile. They were waist-deep in many places. You became accustomed to the stench after a while, and the occasional crack of gas-bloated aliens rupturing. In recent weeks alien fauna had begun to erupt overnight, seemingly from nowhere. Fanged pumps that spurted out spore-clouds, polluting the air. They had tried to destroy them when they’d first appeared before learning that this only served to release a sudden, choking blast of deadly spores.

This morning was quiet, although the lull would be temporary. The monsters swept past in waves, their destination and intent unclear. Khan knew in her bones there wasn’t much longer left now, for Cobalt Fortress, or for Lazulai. An old soldier’s instinct for a terminal trajectory.

All she could do for her remaining troops was to keep them fighting, make sure they died like soldiers, not like grox in an abattoir. The ending would be the same, but she wanted them to believe the Emperor was still watching, that this fight still mattered.

Khan cast an eye along the ramparts. Two of her soldiers from the 903rd Catachan ‘Night Shrikes’ were on patrol and loomed close in the spore-dimmed dawn haze.

‘Anything to report?’

One of them leaned against the battlements. Her hair was tied away from her face with the ubiquitous red bandana of Catachan. ‘Nothing to report, major.’ She grinned, gesturing at the corpse fields. ‘But the weather up here’s just like home.’

‘Don’t get too comfortable. You two just cycled out of ground-watch?’

The Catachan nodded.

Khan glanced at the weapon slung at the trooper’s back. ‘Not much use for a claw up here, Trooper Lief. It’s the aerial variants the bastards send after us topside, and by the time they’re close enough for you to use that, you’ll be dead.’

The soldier laughed. ‘Gotta show the pretty little Cadians how Catachans do things.’

‘Catachans do things by surviving,’ Khan said. ‘You’ll have a better chance of that with a lasgun in your hand. Understood?’

‘As you say, sir. As long as I frag myself some xenos.’

Khan grunted. ‘Just don’t frag yourself, soldier.’ She turned to continue past them, along the ramparts. Every regiment dealt differently with the stress, she thought. Some were lost to denial, others to despair. Catachans tended to become more Catachan, aggressively so, as Lief had.

‘Sir!’ the trooper called.

Khan glanced back to see Lief gesture in the direction she’d been heading.

‘Looks like xenos-bait at the north tower.’

Khan turned and squinted. She made out a small human figure at the base of one of the gun emplacements, slightly closer to the edge of the battlements than was comfortable. ‘I’ll check it out. Continue your patrol.’ She took a drag on her cheroot and strode back the way the soldiers had come.

It was said that psykers felt the xenos shadow most acutely, but no one was immune to it. Khan couldn’t see how anyone living in this nightmare of constant, chittering dread wouldn’t go mad. Many of Cobalt’s defenders already had. ‘Xenos-bait’ was soldier’s slang for any trooper who’d retreated far enough into their own head that they became impervious to the reality around them, or whose disregard for their own safety in battle became fatal.

She saw him as she rounded the corner. After a time, some people couldn’t resist the screaming call of the ground, the final embrace of the distant earth below that would silence the xenos cacophony forever. A young Cadian, he looked barely more than a child to Khan. He stood at the edge of the battlements beneath the stolid, black gun tower, glassy-eyed, gazing up at the roiling sky, his white knuckles gripped tight around his lasgun.

‘Trooper,’ she said. ‘Anything to report?’

‘No, sir. All’s well,’ he replied, still staring upward.

Khan grunted and leaned against the battlements beside him, resting her broad forearms on the obsidian parapet. The temperature was rising, and the black stone was already hot to the touch. Her skin had tanned darker than its normal brown over the months-long burn of the topside watch.

‘And you, soldier? All’s well?’

He turned his gaunt face to her. ‘Yes, sir.’

She noted the name stitched onto his uniform. ‘Tell me straight, Trooper Greiss.’

‘We can’t win, sir,’ he said, avoiding her gaze. ‘We can’t do it, and there’s no reinforcements coming.’ He shot her a glance. ‘I know there aren’t, sir, or they’d be here.’

‘Lazulai’s the gateway to the system, son. Do you really think the Imperium would let it fall?’

‘But sir, the fortress can’t hold out much longer…’ He trailed off.

Khan squared up to the man. ‘This battle is for the world, trooper. We’re stationed here because command needs their best at the hardest posting and General Kvelter tells me the Cadian Two-Thousand-and-Twelfth are the best the Emperor has. Do you want to prove her wrong?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then you keep those skies clear for me.’ She pointed along the wall. ‘When was that gun tower last inspected?’

‘Yesterday, sir.’

‘Do it again. We need to be ready for the next round.’

Greiss nodded, stepping back from the edge and proceeding to the tower.

Khan grimaced as she watched him leave, the lies bitter in her mouth. But he had stepped away from the brink. And what was an officer’s business if not saving soldiers in order for them to die in battle? Lazulai’s grinder was going to take every scrap of meat they could throw at it and there were no more coming. Throne curse the day she’d been nominated to lead.

‘Major,’ came a tense shout from Greiss. ‘Incoming!’

Khan turned and saw the xenos immediately, still an airborne speck on the horizon. The warning siren started up a dull blare and across the obsidian walls soldiers scrambled to respond.

‘Magnoculars,’ she ordered.

Greiss jogged over and passed his across. Raising them to her eyes, Khan focused on the flighted monstrosity: a chitinous horror the size of a Valkyrie, with a broad keel of fluted bone and a tubular protrusion extruding from its vast maw.

The creature’s very motion sent a prickle of horror through Khan, a deeply wired response to something so inherently alien, something so clearly designed to devour. It was an instinct all humans had, but which, in order to survive their home world, Catachans were acutely attuned to. Although even that hadn’t been enough to prepare them for this tide of monsters at this end of days.

Khan noticed the alien was listing slightly, as if injured. But it still headed directly for the fortress. She frowned. How in Throne’s name had it come up on them so quickly?

Khan’s vox buzzed. ‘Major, this is control. Lightning Strikes are ready to deploy on your order.’

‘Hold,’ Khan said, raising the magnoculars once again.

The troops called this form a ‘skyhunter’. It carried aircraft-killers under its wings, hideous lumps of flighted gristle that drained the power from engines and sent planes tumbling from the sky. Khan squinted. This monster’s wings were tattered and all but empty. From here it looked as if just one bubonic warhead remained. Perhaps the xenos had encountered resistance at another outpost. She pushed away the glimmer of hope that arose at that thought. Cobalt was the last of the surviving fortresses for hundreds of miles.

‘Sir,’ control voxed again. ‘Wing-Commander Lennard has the pilots ready to scramble.’

‘Stand them down,’ Khan said. ‘We’d only be giving it a chance to take down a fighter. And I’m not about to give it what it wants.’ They could ill afford to lose any more planes.

The monster was coming in hot and would be above them in seconds. She stubbed out her cheroot on the obsidian-glass battlements.

‘Towers E and G,’ she voxed. ‘Incoming hostile. Ready lascannons.’ Illogical as it was, her hands itched to draw her knife on the abomination. ‘Hit the bastard from both sides, on my count.’ That should be enough from this range, Khan thought.

There was a groan of hydraulics from Tower E, which stood closest to her, and then the snap of las-fire. The ruby beam smashed into the chitinous hide, shearing one leathery wing away entirely and sending the alien wheeling down towards a jutting bastion. It crashed heavily into the defensive outcrop, smashing a chunk of walkway and sending soldiers spinning out over the drop to their deaths.

‘Clear the walls!’ Khan roared. Tower G hadn’t fired. One shot hadn’t been enough to kill the monster, and it hung by one bony wing spur, dangling over the vertiginous drop.

Khan strode towards the battlements, drawing her chainsword as she went. Why hadn’t Tower G fired? She could see half a dozen Catachans and Cadians already concentrating lasgun fire on the beast over the edge of the ramparts. If the skyhunter pulled itself up onto the battlements they would be in trouble.

The hideous thing started up an unholy drone that set Khan’s teeth on edge. Its throat bulged before a rapid, projectile blast of sputum issued from its maw, jetting into the row of defenders and dashing them against the battlements like fallen leaves. She could hear their screams as the corrosive fluid began to melt their skin. Those still standing held the line and continued to fire with grim determination.

‘Frag it! Aim for the head,’ Khan called over the vox.

She saw the first grenade sail out over the edge of the battlements and skitter off the monster’s back, detonating harmlessly as it dropped out of range.

The second slammed into the place where the horror’s wing had been, gouging a human-sized chunk of flesh and splintered bone.

‘I said, aim for the head,’ Khan growled again, adrenaline thumping through her veins.

‘The target’s obscured, sir.’

They were right. To guarantee a direct hit they would have to come right to the rampart’s edge, back into the beast’s range.

Impossibly, the monster was starting to climb, slamming its massive jaws into the sheer black stone as leverage, and dragging its huge body up by the wing-stump. It was seconds away from clearing the ramparts and being able to ram its way inside the fortress. The damage it could do to the remaining defenders inside the enclosed space was unthinkable.

Khan was closing on the damaged bastion, close enough now to smell the tell-tale ozone stench indicating it was about to discharge an organic missile. She was not, however, close enough to stop the Catachan who was even now taking a run-up to dive over the edge, Devil’s Claw blade raised above her head.

‘Trooper, no!’ Khan barked. It was Lief, the idiot from the morning patrol. Khan swore to herself. She should have realised – the Devil’s Claw, the talk of fragging tyranids? Lief was far further gone into the tyranid-madness than she’d realised.

It was too late to stop her. Lief was already in motion. The xenos snarled as the soldier soared above it, and almost too fast to see, the final aircraft killer shot out from under its wing. It smashed directly at the diving Catachan, bursting her head in a bright halo of blood on impact, the mercury-weighted blade she had held bouncing uselessly away, down to the ground far below.

The remainder of the watch squad had already formed up with lasguns as the wounded tyranid began to claw its way up the battlements again.

‘Shoot the maw!’ Khan shouted over the vox. They needed to disable the fleshy cannon in the aberration’s distended jaw before it climbed up high enough to immolate them.

The defenders sent a volley of lasgun fire at the hideous beast as its head emerged over the top of the crenellations. There was a sickening burst as they ruptured its gullet. Strings of lurid viscera trailed from the shattered exoskeleton and floods of ichor gushed from the uselessly pulsing oesophageal valve. But still it kept coming, clawing its way inexorably up over the fortress’ edge with its remaining limb.

The troops fanned out in neat formation across the ruined walkway where the xenos now squatted, positioning themselves to hit it from multiple angles. The monster suddenly lurched forwards, slamming its bone dorsal cage into the stone. There was a judder, and a section of the battlements gave way, trapping two of the soldiers on an island of stone, and in the line of fire directly behind the monster.

‘Cease fire,’ Khan said, readying her chainsword. There was only one way of ending this without losing more of her troopers. The walkway was slick with ichor, and she stepped carefully across the rubble, approaching the monster’s head.

There was a sudden movement as the beast lashed its barb-tipped tail around towards her. Khan dodged a fatal hit to her skull, but the bludgeon glanced against her arm, gouging a lump from her bicep and sending her stumbling. As it raised the barb again, a boltgun shot boomed out, smashing the tip of the tail away before it could dash her brains out. Without hesitating, Khan plunged in close to the monster’s rearing head and snarled her chainsword into its neck. The weapon’s teeth screamed as they ground into the chitin plating around the horror’s skull, biting deeper into whatever was inside its head. Growling, Khan leaned her full weight onto the blade, which juddered and bucked in her powerful arms.

She felt the chainsword throw a tooth at the effort, but she kept going until the revving sword roared clear, and the body collapsed forward, spewing unknown fluids.

A ragged cheer came up from the defenders, but Khan raised a hand, expression severe as she caught her breath.

‘There is nothing to celebrate here,’ she said, fixing each soldier with a hard gaze. ‘This’ – she gestured at the alien with her befouled chainsword – ‘should not have made it onto the fortress walls. This didn’t cost us soldiers today. We did.’

She let the troopers take in the sight of her, veteran of a thousand battles, legend of a dozen systems, bloodied and angry. She glanced meaningfully at the dead, their skin sloughed away by xenos bile.

‘Not all of you are Catachan. But where you came from doesn’t matter now, because you’re all serving on a death world. If we don’t carry each other, we’re all going to fail. And I will terminate any soldier who does not carry their comrades. Is that understood?’ She slowly met the eyes of every trooper in front of her. ‘When you pray tonight, ask Him-on-Terra to grant you another day to repay your comrades. Because every tomorrow is bought with blood. Do not waste it.’ She exhaled heavily. ‘Now, who was in command of Tower G?’

A Cadian stepped forward, chin up. ‘Sir. I was.’

Khan eyed the soldier. She didn’t recognise him. ‘Have you held this command before?’

‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘It should have been Trooper Adair, but she didn’t report for duty.’

Khan frowned. Adair was one of hers. ‘And where is Trooper Adair?’

‘I can take you to her, major.’

Khan turned to see her orderly, Sergeant Rutger Haruto, boltgun still smoking in his hand, bionic eye glinting. She should have known it was Haruto’s shot that saved her from the skyhunter’s tail. He stood head and shoulders above the Cadian troops even though his demeanour was habitually hunched, dark brows beetled low in an expression of perpetual frustration.

She glanced at his gun and gave him a nod, then turned back to the troops.

‘Burn this abomination, and the bodies. We don’t want to leave any meat out.’

Haruto led Khan off the battlements and down into the labyrinthine depths of Cobalt Fortress. Even in the humidity of Lazulai, once you were deep into the miles of identical passages that ran under the mountain, it was cool. It was also claustrophobic, but it was preferable to standing watch under that unholy sky. Khan felt a little tension lift from her shoulders. You could almost pretend you weren’t surrounded by abominations down here.

Aides from different regiments moved swiftly and quietly past them in the ebon gloom. There were mostly Cadians and Catachans left now, interspersed with the occasional preacher or tech-adept. The corridors were hushed, darkness filling the voids between the cold pools of lumen light. The gloom dimmed the whorls of colour in the gemstone walls. The precious stones beneath Lazulai’s skin were what had made the world affluent, and the xenos-cultists had inveigled their way into the weakness cultivated by the greed of the planet’s custodians. Embarrassingly, the Adeptus Ministorum had been the most powerful presence on the world before its downfall. Khan suspected that even now, the Church was having to explain why its priests had been preaching heretic gospels of four-armed Emperors, whilst overseeing the manufacture of the majority of the sector’s gem-encrusted shrines, altars and devotional relic cases.

Haruto walked beside Khan, his shock of dark hair tied back into a messy rat-tail. Her sergeant was sharp. He could pull at things in ways she had only seen the finest strategists or enginseers do, although to most of the Imperium’s non-Catachans he looked closer to an ambull than an adept, and he was habitually treated as such. He was also stubborn as a grox, a trait which had both served and inconvenienced her in the past.

‘Give it to me straight, Haruto,’ Khan said, rolling her neck. The adrenal flush of combat was already ebbing away to be replaced with aches and pains. ‘What’s happened with Adair?’

‘She’s being tried.’

‘What?’ Khan spat.

‘For violation of regulations.’

Khan clenched her fists. ‘Who?’ she growled.

‘Captain Bligh. He’s holding the proceedings in the lower briefing room.’

‘That bastard cost me lives today. What was he thinking, pulling a soldier off duty?’

Haruto cleared his throat. ‘I believe he was thinking that in the absence of a commissar, he was responsible for delivering the Emperor’s Judgement.’

Khan broke into a run.

Haruto kept pace with her easily. Soldiers flattened themselves against the walls to let them past, Khan barrelling ahead, shorter but more muscular than her sergeant.

She slid to a halt outside the briefing room and, finding it locked, hammered on the door.

‘Captain Bligh, this is Major Khan. Open this door now.’

After a moment a nervous-looking adjunct swung the door open. ‘Sir,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Captain Bligh has asked me to remind you–’

Khan swept the man aside and strode into the room. Bligh stood up on a dais at the opposite end, behind a lectern. His uniform was pristine, but his cheeks were gaunt, sweat glistening on his pallid skin. Rows of Cadians stood ranked down each side of the room.

Trooper Adair was on her knees in the centre, hands cuffed behind her. She had her broad back to Khan, but she somehow still radiated insolence. Half a dozen soldiers had their lasguns trained on her.

‘Weapons down,’ Khan barked.

The Guardsmen obeyed the senior officer immediately.

‘Captain Bligh,’ Khan said through gritted teeth, her patience for diplomacy run very thin. ‘In the interests of continued good relations between our regiments I am giving you ten seconds to explain what in the name of Terra is going on here.’

Bligh gripped the lectern in front of him. ‘Trooper Falke Adair has been found guilty of infringement of discipline, breach of the disciplinary code and insubordination.’ He spoke Gothic with the clear, clipped intonation of the Cadian’s officer class.

Khan looked at him expressionlessly. ‘That’s all? You’ve not commanded Catachans before, have you, Captain Bligh?’

There was a stifled snort from somewhere in the room. The tension was dissolving, but Captain Bligh’s eye twitched.

Khan leaned forward, and lowered her voice. ‘Captain. The walls are being beaten down by monsters as we speak. Are you certain any of this is a priority?’

‘We need to hold the line, sir. If we don’t have standards, we don’t have anything!’

‘Get up, Trooper Adair,’ Khan ordered.

Adair stood and turned. She had biceps that could crush a man’s skull and a face that could launch a thousand recruiting drives, with a broad, strong jaw and pict-friendly cheekbones under a crop of white-blonde hair. She’d have been the archetype of military perfection were it not for the smirk twisting her otherwise noble face. Khan could spot trouble a mile off, and Adair was the kind of trouble that left broken hearts, teeth and formal warnings in her wake.

‘What did you do, trooper?’ Khan asked.

‘Took some trophies, sir. Didn’t fancy Captain Bligh’s request to take ’em down from the mess wall, so I put them up where he couldn’t reach ’em. He’s had it in for me since.’

Khan heard Haruto trying to stifle a snigger behind her. Adair was a brute, taller than the average Catachan, and Bligh barely came up to her shoulder. She could easily have put him under her arm and carried him if she wanted.

Khan turned to Bligh. ‘That hardly seems to warrant a hearing. Catachans take trophies, captain. It’s appropriate to allow for regimental traditions for the sake of morale.’

‘That’s not in fact why Trooper Adair is here, major,’ Bligh said through gritted teeth.

Khan inclined her head. She felt the muscles in her neck twinge. Throne, but she was too tired and angry for this. ‘No?’

‘Yesterday she disobeyed a direct order to remain at her post. As a consequence, four of my soldiers died.’

Khan glanced sharply at Adair. The trooper’s face had dropped to a sullen blank. ‘Is this true, Adair?’

‘Sir,’ Adair said, her voice toneless, her earlier braggadocio gone.

Captain Bligh shook his head, lip curled. ‘This is the kind of disregard for command that will defeat us before the xenos. She abandoned her comrades without even knowing who they were, what they were worth.’

‘No,’ Adair said quietly.

‘No?’

‘No, sir. I know who they were.’ Adair looked up. ‘They were Sergeant Clay, Trooper Dakor, Trooper Vance and Trooper Colm.’ A muscle in her jaw twitched. ‘They died fighting, but they died because I wasn’t at my post, it’s true.’

Bligh turned to Khan. ‘Now that you appreciate the situation, major, I must strongly insist that this hearing is concluded and that Trooper Adair is punished appropriately.’

Khan rubbed her eyes. ‘If you insist, captain.’ She could do without Adair being in the brig, but perhaps a rest would do the trooper some good.

‘The execution of Trooper Adair will take place at dusk,’ Bligh continued.

‘What?’ Khan growled.

‘It is clearly the punishment commensurate with the infraction.’

The soldiers in the room muttered and shifted. Haruto swore.

‘Sir,’ one of the other Cadians said, a red-headed Whiteshield. ‘Requesting permission to speak?’

‘Denied,’ Bligh said.

‘Granted,’ Khan countermanded. ‘Step forward.’

The young soldier pushed her way to the front of the crowd. ‘Sir. I was loader on a weapons team at the north wall yesterday. My gunner was shot down and ours was the only heavy bolter left.’ She swallowed, the strain of defying her commanding officer evident. ‘Trooper Adair moved from her post on the south wall to operate the weapon until reinforcements arrived. Without her, the xenos could have gained ingress to the fortress via the north hangar.’

Khan could picture the entrance to the external battlements, wide enough to allow the largest tyranids in. What they would do if they gained access to the fortress required little imagination.

‘It wasn’t her decision to make, soldier,’ Captain Bligh snapped. ‘Her choice resulted in the deaths of the squad she had been ordered to cover. If a soldier cannot hold their post, they cannot be trusted.’

‘I’ve heard enough,’ Khan said. Her feet ached and she was fairly sure the xenos filth on her fatigues was starting to eat through the fabric. She summoned her last reserves of patience. ‘We all have to be more than our posts in this war, captain. I understand your anger, but this is an emotional response, not a logical one. Trooper Adair did the right thing. If she hadn’t done what she did, we wouldn’t be here to argue about it. I’m sorry about the deaths of your soldiers, but we don’t have enough fighters left for you to start shooting them. And for what it’s worth, I’d order Adair to do the same thing again.’

‘Major…’ Bligh said, fixing Khan with a hard stare.

Khan held his gaze. ‘You caused Adair to be away from her post this morning, captain. That was an action that nearly cost me a squad too. Let’s call it even?’

Bligh was silent.

‘Trooper Adair,’ Khan said, still maintaining eye contact with Bligh. ‘You’ll write a chit to the families of the Cadians to tell them they died as bravely as Jungle Fighters. And you’ll start treating your commanders with more respect, or Throne help me I’ll beat that lesson into you myself. Understood?’

Adair nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Captain Bligh,’ Khan said, ‘I recommend you take a break this morning. This hearing is over.’

‘No,’ Bligh said, then repeated it more loudly. ‘No.’ His face twisted. ‘Commissar Schuto won’t stand for this.’ He drew a laspistol and aimed it at Adair.

Khan made a small motion to halt whatever action Haruto was planning to take in her defence. ‘Commissar Schuto is dead,’ she heard him mutter.

‘Put the gun down, Bligh,’ said Khan.

‘Discipline must be enforced!’ spat Bligh. ‘If we are to prevail, we must behave like soldiers. Don’t move,’ he snarled at Adair, who had been positioning herself to attack him despite her still-cuffed hands.

Khan gave her a warning glance and began to walk towards Bligh.

‘Stay back, major!’ Bligh snapped.

‘No,’ she said, moving forward softly, one step at a time.

Bligh aimed his gun at Khan. ‘I said, stay back!’

Khan kept inching forward. ‘You won’t shoot.’

‘I will,’ Bligh said, hand shaking.

‘You won’t. Because Cadians are good soldiers. You follow orders even when you’re half mad.’

She was right in front of Bligh now. She placed one of her massive hands over the laspistol’s barrel. ‘Let go of the gun, soldier,’ she said soothingly, as if reassuring a frightened animal.

‘Things need to be done properly. It’s the only way we can win,’ Bligh said, jaw set.

‘Then let’s take this to General Kvelter. She’s fair. She’ll make the right decision.’

Bligh nodded slowly as he considered this, and with her left hand Khan gently pulled the weapon from his unresisting fingers. Then she shot up her right fist lightning-fast and punched the captain, hard. He jerked backward at the force of the blow, then crumpled to the floor, eyes rolling back in his head.

‘You,’ Khan said, gesturing at a Cadian lieutenant. ‘Take your captain. Put him somewhere he won’t do himself or anyone else any harm.’

‘Sir…’ The lieutenant frowned, biting back what she wanted to say.

Khan sighed. ‘Out with it, soldier.’

‘Captain Bligh is a hero, sir.’ The lieutenant’s distress was visible. ‘He led the last patrol out of Cobalt. He was wounded holding the line while the tank column withdrew. Carried back three injured soldiers himself.’

Khan nodded. ‘And that, lieutenant, is why I didn’t kill him. I suggest you get him to the infirmary sooner rather than later.’

Adair watched the Cadians carry the captain out and folded her arms. Kill bullets were tattooed onto the rippling muscles of her biceps around a crudely inked regimental crest of a monstrous Catachan Shrike.

‘They talk themselves up, but the Cadians can’t hack it here, sir,’ Adair said. ‘Not like us.’

‘Us?’ Khan repeated. ‘You mean Catachans like Trooper Velope, who broke out of the fortress to try to “save” his squad a week after he saw them die? Or Lief, who just tried to take out a skyhunter with a knife? Neither of them is still here to hack it. Everyone is going their own variety of mad, trooper. Assuming you’re above that is the quickest route to it. Stay watchful.’

‘Sir.’

‘And Adair,’ Khan said, gripping the woman’s massive bicep. ‘You did the right thing yesterday. Do you understand?’

‘Yessir. Thank you, sir.’

‘Good. Now get topside and help clean up. I’ve got a meeting with command.’

General Kvelter was an old-fashioned officer. Even as the world was ending, she insisted on briefing the senior staff in her office – a formal, wood-panelled room lined with paintings of notable Cadians. Today, Khan found herself the only senior officer there. She was quite possibly, she realised, the only one left. Kvelter sat at one end of a long table while her orderly, Lieutenant Bose, served her recaff.

‘Ah, Major Khan,’ Kvelter said. ‘Take a seat, would you?’

Sergeant Haruto poured recaff into the cup placed beside Khan, then took up post behind her chair. Lieutenant Bose prided himself in ensuring things ran as they should in the general’s office, and that Kvelter was always immaculately turned out. Not a silver hair on the old officer’s head was out of place. In contrast, Khan was aware that she was dripping blood and gore onto the general’s carpet, and that half of her uniform would probably need to be burned. Haruto and Bose already detested each other, and this was unlikely to help. Although Khan suspected the business of maintaining their low-level feud was perhaps one of the small things still keeping them sane.

‘Quiet morning topside, I hear,’ Kvelter said briskly.

‘I’ve had worse.’

Kvelter nodded. ‘I appreciate your leniency with Captain Bligh.’

‘News travels fast.’ Khan sipped her scalding recaff.

‘He’s a good soldier.’

‘They’re all good soldiers in bad positions, sir.’

Kvelter nodded. ‘Just so.’

The old Cadian was sharp as a knife and Khan had come to respect her. Cobalt would have fallen months ago had it not been for her shrewdness. She ran the operation like clockwork, and it was to her credit that the cracks were only recently starting to show.

Kvelter cleared her throat. ‘I’ll get to the point, major. You have new orders.’

Khan placed her cup down. ‘Sir?’ There had been no new orders from sector command for months, not since the xenos cast their blanket of silence over Lazulai. Hold and fight was all they’d been told.

‘We have reports of an incoming swarm – something larger than we’ve ever seen. Spotter planes are going dark across the continent. Before it hits, you’re to take a small infiltration team deep into the eastern regions to recover an asset. You’ll be aware that in recent weeks a number of units have been deployed from Cobalt Fortress, and that all have been neutralised. Most recently a squadron of Lightning Strikes.’

Khan raised an eyebrow. ‘And before that a tank column. I see the wreckage daily on my patrol topside. Sir, sending an infiltration team out into that environment is a suicide mission.’

Kvelter allowed herself the shadow of a smile. ‘Possibly, but not necessarily.’ She gestured to Bose.

The lieutenant placed an open file in front of Khan.

‘You will take your team to Opal Bastion,’ the general continued. ‘It is located approximately fifty miles east of Cobalt Fortress. There will be a liaison officer from the Cadian Eighty-Second waiting there to guide you onward to the asset you are tasked with recovering. That asset is of immeasurable value.’

‘What is it?’

‘Classified. Above your clearance, and mine. But you will be escorting an agent-adept of the Adeptus Mechanicus who will oversee the extraction. She just arrived via orbital lander with the final orders from sector command.’

‘They want me to take a cog-worshipper on a tour of the apocalypse?’ Khan pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘And what will you be doing whilst I’m out getting my squad ripped apart by xenos, sir?’

‘Losing the fort.’

Khan stared blankly at the general. ‘What?’

‘Losing the fort,’ she repeated.

Cold uncertainty gnawed at Khan’s guts. ‘With all due respect, sir–’

Kvelter cut her off. There was a thin smile on her face. ‘Major, I can confirm what you already suspect. There are no reinforcements coming. As far as command is concerned, Lazulai is lost. But there is one shred of use the Imperium may yet take from this planet. One shred of use that you and I might yet be. You recall the failed operations we spoke of a few moments ago?’

Khan regarded her silently.

‘They were tasked with the same mission. Go east, recover the asset. We dispatched tanks, aircraft, infantry. None of it worked. The xenos became aware of them immediately.’ She leaned back. ‘We’ve tried throwing our weight around, and it didn’t work. We need them not to notice us. So, we’re going to send a core of our best Jungle Fighters into the jungle.’

Khan frowned. ‘There’s no jungle on Lazulai.’

‘Things have changed in the past few weeks, major. But it’s less about the terrain, although that will present a challenge.’ She gestured to the file. ‘Of all of us left, your people are the best equipped to navigate the hellscape the tyranids have wrought here. You’ll find everything we know about the current situation in that file.’

Khan slid the file across to Haruto. She wasn’t much for reading, but she had already felt him craning over her shoulder to get a glimpse of the picts and maps.

‘And whilst you head east,’ the general said, lilac-hued eyes glinting, ‘I’m pulling every asset we’ve got and moving north. I want the enemy to think we’re heading for Jasper Fortress. I’m going to give the bastards a light show. Provide sufficient cover that you have a chance of flying under their auspex.’

‘And give the troops a last fight. A proper one,’ Khan said.

General Kvelter nodded.

‘Still, it’s a damn high butcher’s bill for a recovery mission.’

‘Yours is the last mission, major. And one which we must accomplish by any means necessary. The order came from Lord Commander Stone himself.’ Kvelter placed her hands on the desk and lowered her voice. ‘This could be it, major. This could be what we’ve been waiting for. Something that could stop the bastards, not just on Lazulai, but across the Imperium.’

‘You think we’re recovering a weapon?’

‘What else could be such a priority for command?’ Kvelter pursed her lips. ‘And if it is, it’s worth the price.’

Khan regarded the general. There was no fear in the wiry Cadian’s eyes. Her will was so hard it could slice bone. ‘It’ll be a good death, sir.’

‘I doubt it,’ Kvelter laughed dryly. ‘But we take what we’re given. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an assault to plan.’ She rose to her feet. ‘It’s been an honour, Wulf.’

‘Likewise.’ Khan saluted and made to leave, then turned back and extended a hand. ‘Cadia stands, sir.’

Kvelter gripped her hand and gave Khan a hard smile. ‘She stands. Happy hunting, major.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
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