Part 1 (1/2)

CADIAN BLOOD.

Imperial Guard.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden.

Dedicated to Mum and Dad, because theya'd kill me if I didna't.

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the G.o.ds, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carca.s.s writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the s.p.a.ce Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their mult.i.tudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants a- and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most b.l.o.o.d.y regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting G.o.ds.

PROLOGUE.

The Way a World Dies.

I.

At first there was silence.

People died, but there was no outcry. The bodies rested in noiseless repose in tower habitation spires; in the prayer rooms of great monasteries; in gutters by the sides of streets. The deaths went unnoticed. This was a world that saw ten million new pilgrims each month a- it was no stranger to off-worlders making planetfall only to die soon after.

The shrineworld of Kathur, named for the saint himself, was a beacon of faith and hope for the people of Scarus Sector. Faith flared or withered for those who came to tread the holy soil of this blessed world, seeking affirmation for lives lived without meaning. Hope flowered or died for those who landed here seeking to touch the relics of a long-dead saint and be healed of injury or illness.

When people began to die there was no planet-wide panic, no ringing sirens wailing across cities, and no distress calls to nearby worlds, crying of a devastating disease. The sickness spread, tearing through the population, but to those who watched for such things, it was just a spike in the numbers. These things happened from time to time.

A plague brought from off-world, the worlda's leaders said. Faith will scourge the taint from the righteous and pure.

No warnings. No panic.

Silence.

II.

The silence did not last long.

At the dawn of the outbreaka's second week, there were too many dead for the funeral priests to haul into the consecrated incinerators, and the Ecclesiarchy governors realised their planet was suffering no natural plague. The death toll was catastrophic, and the Kathurite acolytes traditionally tasked with funerary rites walked the streets in gangs, losing the battle to do their simple duty.

The initial astropathic cries for help reached out from Kathur. Several hundred psykers worldwide screamed their pleas into the warp, begging for a.s.sistance. Imperial forces in the sector responded to the cries for aid in impressive time: Scarus was forever the Archenemya's ripest target, and the Emperora's servants never relaxed their vigilance here. Fleets of s.h.i.+ps powered up their engines and broke into the warp, chasing the source of the psychic screams like bloodhounds pursuing the scent of prey.

The stream of comm-channel messages and psychic transmissions from Kathur told of a plague without end, of millions already dead, of a planet dying.

The Imperium was no stranger to the Curse of Unbelief. Even now, the plague wracked dozens of worlds across Segmentum Obscuras a- but Kathur was the anomaly, the one world that broke the pattern of infection. The other infected worlds stood on the rim of the Warmastera's Black Crusade. Kathur, however, was far from the Great Eye and the systems drowning in the tides of battle.

All this death made no sense. There was no s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p of the Archenemy to spread the taint, no touch of heresy detected among the populace, and no sign of Chaos in the planeta's rule.

But it was the Curse.

The Curse of Unbelief ripped across the shrineworld now, taking those who lacked true faith in the G.o.d-Emperor. It rotted flesh and turned organs putrescent while the victims still lived. Many turned to suicide rather than decay in agony. Riots broke out over the planet. Funeral pyres burned endlessly, the streams of black smoke choking the sky around the largest cathedral-cities.

The Adeptus hierarchs receiving the first wave of communications from Kathur ordered the planet cut off from the Imperium at the first signs of the Curse of Unbelief. a.s.sembled in the heavens above the doomed world, a mighty fleet coalesced over the course of several days. They did not come to save the people a- they came only to stop the population evacuating. The taint, the fleet-captains knew, must never be spread. On the command decks of Imperial Navy vessels stationed in high orbit, stern-faced inquisitors oversaw the blockadea's management.

No vaccine had ever been found to ease the sufferings of the afflicted. In the words of Inquisitor Caius, as he stood on the bridge of the Gothic-cla.s.s vessel In His Name, a”We consign these souls to oblivion, for mercy now would d.a.m.n us all.a”

The blockade of Imperial Navy vessels hung in the reaches above Kathur, enforcing the quarantine with lethal vigour. Thousands of the Emperora's citizens died under the anger of Imperial guns as the blockade vessels fired on any s.h.i.+p fleeing the planet. It wasna't long before the attempts ceased. The people on the surface were either too ill to make the journey, or already dead.

Bizarrely, pilgrims sought to make planetfall, still wis.h.i.+ng to walk among the cathedral-cities of the sainta's world and receive the blessing of Saint Kathur. Any attempts by pilgrim vessels to reach the surface were deterred by stern threats and the weapons batteries of Cobra-cla.s.s destroyers. Such warnings, a barefaced presentation of the Emperora's might, were enough for most s.h.i.+ps. A single vessel had been filled with souls pious enough to run the blockade. This s.h.i.+p, a wallowing barge little more than a cargo hauler and packed with three hundred pilgrims, ultimately did make it down to the surface of Kathur. What remained of the s.h.i.+p after its brief encounter with Imperial Fury fighters flamed through the atmosphere and crashed into the western ocean.

Inquisitor Bastian Caius of the Ordo Sepulturum stayed in vox-contact with the Enforcer Marshal of Kathur, a man by the name of Bannecheck, until the very end of Imperial control. The commander of the planeta's Enforcers remained in touch with the inquisitor for seventeen days, describing the scenes of carnage and plague ravaging the surface as his men tried to retain order. Every word was recorded. Each syllable of his rhythmic cant, distorted as it was by vox interference. Through this crackling monotone, Caius learned of the erosion and breakdown of Imperial rule.

On the third day of contact, the marshal reported cults rising among the dwindling Kathur Planetary Defence Force, and of cultists within being spared the cursea's death. The Dictate Imperialis was broken, the Emperora's Law abandoned. By this time, the global law enforcement force was already effectively destroyed. It fell to the elite Enforcers to take to the streets, slaughtering cultists in a series of brutal raids on hidden strongholds.

Despite initial successes, they were doomed to fail.

On the sixth day, chanting rose from temples across the planet a- no longer in praise of the Emperor, but now pleading to the Ruinous Powers for mercy. Control across the planet was under threat, with the capital city of Solthane standing out as the final bastion of Imperial order. The Enforcers entered the cathedral districts of Solthane in unprecedented force, leading the shattered remains of still-loyal PDF and the still-living law enforcement officers. Their objective was to quell the rising cults across the planet in a decisive and d.a.m.ning half-week of fighting.

Bannecheck reported losses among his forces of ninety-three per cent on the morning of the ninth day. The cultsa' numbers were far greater than had been initially surmised. Those that were not already well-armed by the PDF defectors overcame Enforcer a.s.sault teams by sheer weight of numbers. The marshal produced evidence, in both audio and pict form, of his men dragged down and eaten by plague victims in some districts, and falling under fire from hordes of cultists in others.

Caius looked at other grey, blurry picts beamed up from the surface by Bannecheck. Here an Enforcer teama's Repressor tank flamed in the street; there a horde of plague victims surrounded a monastery filled with dying citizens.

Too many of the dead had not been destroyed. The still-living population were paying for the failure of the funereal priesthood now.

On the eleventh day, reports became increasingly choppy and erratic. The swelling cults claimed whole districts of the dying cities, each member saved from death by their new allegiance. Chaos emanations wreathed the planet, eroding all reliability in astropathic contact and paining all psychically-gifted souls aboard the blockade fleet vessels. The s.h.i.+psa' Navigators and all present inquisitors had a lifetime of training to resist such invasive psychic agony, but they still suffered. The touch of Chaos infected many of those without psychic talents: incidents of homicide and apostasy broke out aboard the destroyer vessels. These were quickly crushed by inquisitor-led purges, though the Cobra destroyer Terraa's Spite was lost when the unrest within the s.h.i.+pa's bowels led to explosions in the enginarium. Three hundred souls lost, and the wreckage rained on the cathedral cities below a- a storm of fire from the heavens.

The inquisitors ordered the blockade into a higher orbit after the s.h.i.+pboard purges were complete. Kathur was now an unholy beacon within the warp, and proximity to the foulness sweeping the planet was deemed a moral threat to the Naval crews. Small cl.u.s.ters of destroyers...o...b..ted the planet in s.h.i.+fts, then broke away to allow others their turn. No captain wished to risk his men becoming tainted by the Archenemya's emanations rising from the doomed world below.

On the seventeenth day, the horde of curse victims besieging the Enforcer precinct headquarters battered down the final barricades, and the handful of still-living black-armoured peacekeepers fell. Inquisitor Caius recorded the Enforcer Marshala's final words for Ordo Sepulturum records.

a”We will stand before the Throne and we will not flinch before His judgement, for we die doing our duty.a” The inquisitor could hear the moistness of the mana's lips in each word. The marshal had been dying, coughing up mouthfuls of diseased blood. He finished with a strained a”The Emperor protects.a”

In truth, there had been more, but Caius deleted the mana's final oaths cried in agony and the wails of the plague victims in the room. Some stories didna't need to be told.

With the blockade in place, there was talk of Exterminatus, of bombarding the world from s.p.a.ce in the name of the Emperor. Such discussion was quickly quenched. Orbital bombardment would not be sanctioned: the damage to the planeta's precious architecture, as well as the loss of so many relics, would be the gravest sin. To use virus bombs would destroy all hope of resettlement for months to come, without guaranteeing the final deaths of the plague victims. To use cyclonic torpedoes would ravage the planet on the tectonic level a- blasphemy beyond belief.

So Kathur was allowed to die.

III.

Preparations were made on worlds elsewhere in Scarus Sector. The talk of outbreaks, quarantines and blockades became plans for invasion. Weeks pa.s.sed before these preparations bore fruit, but for all its slowness, the Imperial war machine was a relentless beast. How did this happen?