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The Last Crucible – Extract

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THE LAST CRUCIBLE

by Noah Nguyen

Kataryn Moloth, inquisitor of the Ordo Militarum, was reviewing her requisition order when storm troopers tossed a sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked wretch before her.

A proud wretch, who dared look up.

‘The insubordinate, Lady Moloth. As requested.’ Captain Duxxor’s face was a brutal slab with a knobby scar. ‘I’, the Inquisition’s unmistakable seal. All of Kataryn’s storm troopers had earned the mark.

Kataryn dismissed Duxxor. Her interview with the prisoner would hardly slow her review. Mental engrams from a lifetime of cognitive indoctrination had compartmentalised her intellect. Her mind was a mapped labyrinth.

From her peripheral vision, she examined the insubordinate. He wasn’t handsome. An ugly man, with stark eyes. Whatever world tithed him to the Astra Militarum had done their young eligibles a favour.

Yet his back was straight, and men with spines were what Kataryn needed.

‘Lieutenant Truce Corrut,’ Kataryn recited. ‘Provisional commander. Cerberus Company. Some line battalion, some Elysian regiment. Charged with insubordination following a counter-attack against standing orders.’ She spared a glance. ‘Did I miss anything?’

‘Madame inquisitor.’ Corrut clambered up. ‘I’m not a heretic. I don’t know what they told you, but I’ve kept faith with the Emperor every day of my life.’

Kataryn straightened the collar of the gambeson concealing her neck. Corrut was no liar. She knew liars. He was faithful. Having seen her rosette, observant. Hopefully, intelligent.

Kataryn thumbed her rosette’s sigil, still scanning the requisition order before her. ‘Lady Moloth will do, Corrut. I’m an inquisitor, not a spire baroness. Sit.’ She motioned to the cushioned stool beside her ornate desk. The seat was the same as hers.

Corrut sat, surveying the vaulted chamber. No doubt he expected a torturer’s cell, but these were Kataryn’s personal quarters. They tripled as a library, an arsenal, a chapel. There was no bed.

‘This matter’s related to your charge,’ Kataryn said. ‘But frankly I haven’t come to Eleutane for matters of minor insubordination. Tell me, were your charges appropriate?’

Wheels turned in the gruff soldier’s head. Perhaps he was thinking he had less to worry about than he’d feared, or that this was no trial at all. The truth was, every moment of Corrut’s miserable life had been a trial, and it all led here.

‘No,’ Corrut said.

‘The necrons butchered your Guardsmen during your counter-attack.’

Corrut’s gaze darkened. ‘I saw an opportunity and moved on it. That’s my job, milady. To take initiative. Necrons don’t make many mistakes, but they overextended themselves that day.’

He waited for a reply. Kataryn only observed.

The silence prodded him on. ‘It was a good call. If the companies on the flanks had supported Cerberus, we could have broken the enemy salient.’

Kataryn nodded. She had done exhaustive research on Eleutane’s flagging campaign before summoning Corrut. His words bore the truth. And besides this isolated blemish, his record suggested so much potential.

‘You were a provisional commander,’ she said. ‘Why weren’t you simply relieved?’

Corrut’s lips hardened. He had that look, of course. Of one who challenged foolish orders. ‘Someone wanted to make an example.’

‘It would be a good example to make if rash calls were getting soldiers killed. But you don’t think that at all, do you?’

Corrut scowled. ‘No. Someone with rank on their shoulders threw me on the pyre to save themselves. One of the other company commanders, likely. They should’ve had my back.’

‘Insightful. The truth is worse. Your case is related to all of Eleutane’s myriad setbacks and delays.’

Corrut winced. ‘Setbacks?’

‘You’ve heard. Everyone has. No ground’s been gained for months. Necrons dominate Eleutane’s lower geosphere. The marshal-adamant’s forces, despite his reputation, have made no progress.’

‘We’ve proven ourselves throughout the Urdonne Sector, milady. The marshal’s all that’s held us together since the Noctis Aeterna began.’

‘So I’m told. But by my assessment, Eleutane shouldn’t need the reinforcements en route from the Gothic Sector. Not with the kind of forces at this world’s disposal. Not without deeper, more troubling issues.’

Corrut paused. ‘Respectfully, there are deeper issues. Mid-level command’s full of idiots and careerists. I’ve dealt with the scavengers enough to know. Lady Moloth, is this an interrogation?’

That caught Kataryn off guard. Corrut had a whole-hearted earnestness. Soldiers were made to bend. Some were needles, some were nails, but malleability was necessary to shape them into the killers the Imperium needed. Corrut was as hard as a hammer.

‘No,’ Kataryn said. ‘A test, perhaps. What if I told you treachery was behind the failures here? That traitors were subverting the campaign and saw to your charges to conceal their transgressions?’

Corrut’s brow wrinkled. ‘I wouldn’t believe it. Good soldiers serve on Eleutane. Elysians, Jourans, Valhallans–’

‘Idiots and careerists,’ Kataryn said.

Corrut shrugged. ‘Every army has those.’

Kataryn respected his candour. Honesty was an inquisitor’s mandate, too. Speak truth to power. Sear it into their hearts and minds, with flame.

Kataryn reclined. ‘Projection. You’re faithful, so you imagine others are. You’d die for the Emperor. You think everyone would. But not everyone shares your virtues.’

‘I’m no fool, milady. I know how many weaklings and imbeciles man the lines. But traitors…’

Kataryn shot to her feet, her seat clattering somewhere behind her. ‘Don’t be naive. All heresy is born from lesser shortcomings. Where did you think it starts? Sensible soldiers become heretics to save themselves, or because they are fools. These are no reasons to suffer their existence.’

Corrut bowed. ‘If there are traitors on Eleutane, I would kill them with my own hands.’

‘Only because you believe there aren’t.’ Kataryn mastered the hatred in her breathing. ‘You think me paranoid, but soon you’ll see. Trust no one. Question everything.’ Her mentor’s words. Lord Rabsyn. It had been so long.

Kataryn sealed her requisition order. ‘This is to be delivered to the marshal-adamant. It places you under my direct command. I require an officer familiar with Eleutanese operations to assist my investigation. I want pelts, Corrut. You’re going to help me cull the wolves.’ A servitor plodded over from its charging nook between laden library shelves on ponderous, metallic legs. It retrieved the requisition and pounded off again, to Kataryn’s scriveners.

Corrut watched it go. ‘And my charges?’

Kataryn prowled to her armoury. More servitors gasped to life in their feeding docks. They affixed conduits to her gambeson, fitting plate segments around her, drilling them together until the armour seals hissed. ‘Your fate’s in my hands. If Eleutane is as free of treachery as you suggest, then indeed you weren’t framed. You were merely insubordinate and will be sentenced appropriately.’ Kataryn’s judgement was never a knife to the back. It was a sword through the heart.

Corrut went stone-still. Today was his trial. There existed no better measure of a man’s character than his conduct on death row.

Kataryn summoned Duxxor. Storm troopers dragged Corrut from the chamber. ‘Equip him from our armoury,’ she ordered. ‘Eleutane’s a warzone. We’ll not give him any excuses to die before we’re done.’

Eleutane was strange. From orbit, the surface appeared craggy, terrestrial. Desolate.

Below those barrens lay another world. A cavernous ocean spanned Eleutane’s subsurface. There the planet’s savages hunted leviathan troglobites lurking in the deep. Beyond that, the under-sea was a quaint fact. The tithe dominated the authorities’ attentions. Surface mining was the business of the day.

Yet whatever mysteries Eleutane’s lower geosphere concealed, the necrons hadn’t forgotten. After the Great Rift cut open the bowels of the Imperium, the ancient xenos breed moved. Hunchbacked necron emissaries proclaimed their phaeronic lord’s return to Eleutane. They crowed over hacked Imperial communications about their due. Those protestations seemed pathetic, belaboured – until they attacked.

Fighting was centered around Tona Complex, an industrial installation half burrowed into Eleutane’s raised continental shelf. Control of the nearby Well – a mile-wide hollow leading into the under-sea – was critical. The xenos seized it in days.

Kataryn had always compared the arrogant necron breed with the long-nailed mandarins and court astrologers of Old Terra. They were fragile with hubris, made spiteful by their knowledge, always complaining bitterly about their loss of empire the way human elders mourn the lost mastery of their bladders. The necron dynasties were a decaying species with a gutted husk of a culture. The only purpose remaining to them was to die out and allow humanity to seize its inheritance.

But on Eleutane, the necrons proved themselves cunning, astute and relentless. Their legions adapted to each of the Militarum’s strategies, then mirrored and mocked them. The unliving breed perverted the honest butchery of respectable warfare into an abstract science, as immune to human understanding as their esoteric techno-sorceries.

Imperial casualties mounted. Fighting grew tougher until friendly lines receded to Tona’s most favourable positions, where they held firm.

Now necrons controlled the under-sea. After exterminating the indigenous abhumans below, enigmatic vessels forged from unidentifiable alloys began routinely piercing Eleutane’s surface, extracting at liberty whatever secrets they had come for. They passed through Eleutane’s uncontested airspace at will. It was shameful. It made Kataryn physically ill.

None of this information was difficult to come by. Crusade records were detailed and plentiful. The scrupulous marshal-adamant kept his forces disciplined, for he demanded much of them. It was those unrelenting expectations that allowed his hosts to secure the sector from dozens of threats during the darkest hours of the Noctis Aeterna.

He was an inspiration, and he’d carried this burden alone long enough. Imperium Sanctus had finally reached the sector under siege. Eleutane’s purification was at hand. Kataryn would uncover the treachery subverting the world’s war effort. She would excise it.

She already had a working theory. First she had to backtrack from Corrut’s charges.

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