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The Reward of Loyalty – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Reward of Loyalty

Tom Chivers

I

There was something on her visor.

That wasn’t the most important thing – she knew that – but it was all Commander Riva Vistrena could think about. She clawed at her face, wiping whatever it was – blood? Mud? – from her vision. Her ears were ringing. She realised, slowly, that she was lying on her back. The sky was dark through the lumpy muck covering her eyes.

She tried to piece the last few seconds together. They had been holding the ridge, she and her squad. The foul horde of the dead had been in front of her, perhaps fifty yards away, and her troopers’ las-fire had been keeping them at bay. Her own plasma pistol had been warm in her hands, cutting down one of the shambling horrors each time it powered up and fired, and from just behind them their Taurox’s autocannons chattered and barked. The weapons fire lit up the pallid, unhealthy fog around them.

Then there had been a roar of engines. A personnel carrier of unfamiliar design, huge and dark green, came skidding to a halt a few yards behind their line, next to the Chimera. It had made a pervasive humming sound, and she had noticed that it didn’t sit on tracks but floated, a hand’s width or so above the ground. It couldn’t be! she thought. The holy Angels? Alongside us? Its rear hatch had slammed down, and five huge, dark figures had emerged from it…

And then something had happened. A beam of painfully bright light had speared out of the fog from the right flank and struck one of the figures. A chatter of bolter fire came from all sides. Then there was a soft, horrible phut sound, something landed in the middle of her squad, and before she could shout grenade! the world went white, then black, and now here she was.

She managed to wipe the worst of the filth from her visor. There were pinkish lumps in it.

Shaking her head to clear it, still deafened by the blast, she looked around herself. The pale fog hid everything. She crawled, plasma pistol still in her hands, towards an unidentifiable chunk of twisted wreckage that lay nearby, just below the ridge she had been holding a few moments before. She hunkered behind it, breath pounding.

The ringing in her ears was dying away. It was replaced by… silence. Or nearly. There was a chittering and groaning in the distance that set her teeth on edge, but worse was the silence, and it took her a moment to understand why.

The sound of las-fire had stopped.

Slowly, she crawled towards the rear door of the Taurox. Her squadmates had gone.

No – no, they hadn’t. There they were. There was Jackpot, his collar popped up as usual, against regulations: he had a shrapnel wound that had removed the side of his neck. There was grey-haired Boomer, her lieutenant, with a perfectly cauterised hole in his chest that she could have put her fist through. Neither was moving. On the ridge itself were scattered bits of armour and flesh that probably accounted for most of the rest.

Nearer to her, though, there were other bodies. The great dark figures that she had seen burst out of the unidentified personnel carrier were lying scattered around. They wore armour of a rich dark green, their faces helmed. The Emperor’s Angels! she thought, awed, and horrified. She made the sign of the aquila over her breastplate, and instinctively muttered a prayer to He on Terra; only once before had she glimpsed one of the Astartes. She had seen him only for a moment, and from a great distance: even then she had trembled at the sight. She never dreamed she would see five of His great Angels so close.

But if she had dreamed it, she would not have dreamed it like this. The figures were in unnatural positions, their armour scarred with bolt-damage and shrapnel, or displaying seared, open wounds like those on Boomer’s body. She recognised plasma burns when she saw them, and she saw them now. Their transport, whatever it was, was no longer hovering but sitting broken in the mud.

And now, out of the mist, strode a giant.

He was wearing black armour much like that of the Angels of Death, but bigger, and older – Terminator armour, she remembered from briefings. Its pauldrons and greaves were marked with scars of long use, and it buzzed and creaked as he approached, fluid leaking from the joints. He walked with an oddly arrhythmical stride, as though he was limping. Smoke, acrid and unhealthy, pumped from vents on his back and from two censers on his shoulders. His helm was eyeless; a curved blade rose from its forehead like a horn. His left shoulder bore a gold sigil of three skulls arranged in a triangle.

He spoke. Through the ancient armour’s vox-emitter, his voice buzzed like a million flies over a battlefield full of rotting dead, but she could still hear what sounded like a chuckle in his tone.

‘That was not as challenging as I had hoped,’ he boomed. ‘Our less enlightened kin are never anything but a disappointment to me.’

In one hand, as easily as she would her pistol, he held an ancient combi-plasma gun. It dripped oil and coolant, and appeared to be held together with rust and slime, and yet somehow its coils still shone, uncomfortably bright. His other hand was a great blade, serrated and black, with lines of greenish fluid running along its surface like veins under skin.

She knew at once that this figure too was an Angel, but she recoiled instantly at the blasphemy of the thought. She had met and fought regiments of the Astra Militarum who had turned traitor, but surely the Astartes could not fall so low? The idea of the Emperor’s perfect warriors corrupted was too much for her to hold in her mind.

The Terminator spotted a twitch from one of the Angels, and knelt, slowly and almost kindly, beside him. Then he pushed his blade through the banded fibres at the throat of the fallen warrior’s armour. There was another twitch, and then no more.

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