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Redemption Through Sacrifice – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Redemption Through Sacrifice

by Justin Woolley

REDEMPTION THROUGH SACRIFICE. These enormous words had long ago been carved into the grey metal of the drop-ship wall. Positioned above the main ramp and covering the full width of the cavernous hold, they were impossible to miss. Eventually, when the ramp opened like a gaping maw and vomited them out onto whatever battlefield awaited, every man of the Second Rapture Penal Legion, the Meat Dogs, would pass beneath.

Looking up, Marcus van Veenan idly wondered how many of the thousands of souls he shared this space with could even read. The men of the Meat Dogs were not, on the whole, the sharpest bayonets in the armoury. Perhaps some of them had been high-ranking officials or wealthy merchants, but when you were forced into the grey jumpsuit of a penal legionnaire with an explosive collar locked around your neck, your past no longer mattered. Illiterate hive world ganger or planetary governor, they were all together now, one seething mass of humanity, ten thousand men in the hold of a Devourer drop-ship – a space designed for half that.

Van Veenan heard shouting behind him, but before he could turn, someone slammed into his back. Unable to stop, he crashed into the body in front of him. The head attached to that body turned – a face like a cratered moon snarled at him, revealing a mouth full of yellowing teeth.

‘Frag off,’ he said, shoving van Veenan back.

Van Veenan turned to see an equally vicious prisoner. This one, his face pointed like a scowling rat, immediately threw a punch. Reflexively van Veenan dropped into a crouch, the fist flying over his head. It connected with Crater-face behind him. Van Veenan deftly rolled away, standing and moving off through the crowd as Rat-man and Crater-face pummelled each other with their meaty fists. Commissars shouted for them to break it up and eventually provosts clad in riot-armour shoved their way into the mass of convicts and beat them into submission with heavy truncheons.

A crackling vox-amplified voice boomed out over the human cattle. ‘Legionnaires of the Second Rapture Penal Legion, this is Colonel Jairus. Rejoice, for your absolution in the eyes of the God-Emperor is at hand. We have arrived at Vandicius, a world in the grip of heresy, a world worthy of your lives. Remember, it is through your death as ultimate service to Him that the God-Emperor forgives. Redemption through sacrifice. Prepare for drop-ship separation.’

Officers and commissars made their way to fold-down seats around the outside of the hold, strapping themselves securely in place. The only harnesses the penal legionnaires would have would be each other and, if everything went to the warp, the hope that another grey jumpsuit would break your fall.

After a minute the drop-ship jolted as the primary clamps securing it to the transport barge released.

‘Planetary descent in five seconds.’

Van Veenan had been dropped into bad situations before. He’d faced tides of xenos with poor leadership and pointless orders, but at least then he’d known what was coming.

‘Three. Two. One. Release.’

Van Veenan felt the nausea-inducing acceleration as the drop-ship fell into the atmosphere of Vandicius, plummeting in a barely controlled plunge towards whatever waited for them on the surface below.

‘Move! Form up! By the Emperor, move!’ Lieutenant Kirsk, van Veenan’s platoon leader, was yelling, his face turning crimson as the convicts under his command passed beneath the encouraging words of the legion’s motto.

Kirsk ushered the prisoners into a loose formation, each man shuffling along behind the one in front. This was nothing like the tight drilling van Veenan had been used to in the Imperial Guard. They didn’t even march in step. Savages.

It was dusk and the sky was turning lavender. Other drop-ships glowed yellow-orange as they burned through the atmosphere above. Despite the late hour the air here, in what must have been a tropical region of the planet, was warm and heavy with humidity.

Van Veenan’s drop-ship had landed at a requisitioned space port in the upper levels of the city, sandwiched between the arched windows of Ecclesiarchy buildings on one side and the square windows of hab-blocks on the other. The men of the Meat Dogs were spurred on by the shouts of officers and commissars in a long procession that snaked down a ramp descending from the space port to the streets of the lower city.

Some way from the bottom the legion stopped, the men moving forward one excruciatingly slow step at a time. It took van Veenan what seemed like hours to make it down the last five hundred yards. None of the officers seemed concerned and none of the commissars shot anybody so van Veenan assumed they had anticipated the delay. This, at least, seemed typical of his time in the Imperial Guard. It was the time-honoured military tradition of hurry up and wait.

Rounding the final bend van Veenan saw the holdup. Lining the street ahead were hundreds of green supply crates bearing the familiar symbol of the Imperial aquila. Moving among the crates were soldiers, both men and women, dressed in faded brown uniforms – not Guard but what must have been the Vandicius local auxiliary force. Going through the motions as quickly as they could, the soldiers handed weapons to the passing penal legionnaires. When van Veenan reached the front the man beside him was handed an M35 short-pattern lasgun – a weapon as common to Imperial soldiers as socks and boots. Another trooper approached, this one no more than a boy – his uniform bore insignia identifying him as Vandicius auxiliary guard. He passed van Veenan a single lasgun power pack.

Van Veenan took the power pack and looked at the young soldier. ‘What am I supposed to do with this? Throw it at the enemy?’

‘He’s your partner,’ the boy said nervously, indicating the legionnaire beside van Veenan, who was currently holding the lasgun by the barrel. ‘We don’t have enough lasguns for all of you.’

‘Right,’ van Veenan said, ‘but I actually know how to use that, whereas it looks like he thinks it’s for clubbing food.’

‘Prisoner!’ Lieutenant Kirsk roared from where he watched the convicts with barely disguised disgust. ‘Move on!’

Van Veenan almost argued but when he saw Commissar Lex pull his bolt pistol from its holster he reconsidered.

‘So, I guess we’re partners then,’ van Veenan said to the lasgun-wielding brute. ‘What’s your name?’

Van Veenan’s partner-in-arms, who stood at least a foot taller than him, grunted.

‘Grunt then, is it?’ van Veenan said. ‘Well, I’ve got a proposition for you, Grunt. I’m pretty good with a lasgun. I was thinking we could swap. You take the ammo and I’ll keep us alive.’

‘Frag off,’ Grunt said.

‘Right,’ van Veenan replied. ‘That’s a common sentiment around here, isn’t it?’

Night was kept at bay in the city by lumen towers spaced evenly along the main thoroughfares and by the little light that leaked out from the towering buildings, but for a city this size the streets were eerily quiet. No vehicles. No people. Nothing.

Under orders from their officers, platoons of penal legionnaires began to move off in different directions. A large force, including van Veenan’s platoon, marched up a wide avenue beneath overpasses and railcar tracks until they reached a section of the road bordered on either side by the immense stone walls of manufactoria. It was here, in this bottleneck, that a roadblock had been erected.

A Chimera transport that looked to be older than the Emperor Himself was parked perpendicular to the road. In front of it several hundred of the brown-uniformed Vandician auxiliary guard barricaded the street behind a low wall of sandbags and razor wire, flanked at either end by two heavy bolter emplacements. The remaining fifty yards of the broad avenue was covered with a dozen or more spiked vehicle traps hastily constructed from rusting steel beams.

The soldiers of the auxiliary guard looked haggard, their pale faces drawn long, but when they saw the legionnaires approaching their faces brightened – the cannon fodder had arrived.

As the legionnaires came to a disorganised halt a woman approached the officers. Her blonde hair was cut short and she wore a black leather storm coat over her tall and thin frame. A chain around her neck displayed an Inquisitorial rosette.

‘I am Inquisitor Mariette Nikova of the Emperor’s Holy Inquisition,’ she said to Kirsk and the other platoon leaders beside him. ‘Have your men take up positions to hold this road. I’ll address them momentarily.’

Kirsk turned and barked orders to his platoon, who moved to stand behind the line of sandbags and relieve the auxiliary guard. Van Veenan found himself in the third rank, the lasgun-wielding Grunt beside him. One of the auxiliary soldiers, his arm wrapped in a field bandage, looked at van Veenan as he passed. ‘Emperor protect you when those maniacs come back.’

‘Penal legionnaires.’ The woman who’d identified herself as Inquisitor Nikova stood on a stack of empty weapons crates, her long coat flapping rhythmically in the warm breeze. ‘Welcome to Madarn, the capital of Vandicius, a world in the grips of a heresy that could spread across the Imperium. We are here to purge it, to burn its taint away in the name of the God-Emperor. You, as penal legionnaires, have been given the privilege of finding absolution in His eyes and it is here that you will do so. You are to contain the heretics in this sector of the city. None of the wretched creatures are to make it past you. Not one. You will lay down the ultimate sacrifice to the Emperor to see this done. Do you understand?’

The penal legionnaires responded in the affirmative but van Veenan wondered if they understood the power this woman represented. He had dealt with the Inquisition once before and had vowed to never be within a frag’s throw of them again. They were the embodiment of the callousness of the Imperium of Man, the same callousness that saw him wearing a grey jumpsuit solely for doing his duty.

‘You heard the inquisitor,’ came the roar of Commissar Lex from behind them. ‘Ready yourselves to hold the enemy at bay. If they kill your partner, pick up their weapon or their ammunition and continue the fight. You will die by the hand of the enemy, or you will die by mine.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Nuala Kinrade.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-693-7

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