Gloda Bridge Bishopric, Glodalia Parcel, Mertaz, Castur’s Planet, Lougarno System, Rhettian Isthmus, Margins Crusade Zone (ACCESS IS FORBIDDEN)
The rain sizzled as it fell on the flagstones outside the atrium of the Basilica Magna where Lt Marto Agusta and his troopers crouched behind hastily-erected cover of sandbags and empty ammo crates. Down the wide street towards Market Square there was a pile of twisted scrap metal blocking the road that had been two Casturian tanks taken out by accurate mortar fire early in the siege; upwards was the road to the Bishopric Palace of Bishop Avungraard XIV, currently a blazing inferno after a Mutatis bomber had been clipped by anti-aircraft and slammed right on top of it. Civilians had been evacuated or were dwelling in internal bridge vaults. The leaning Alto-Rymean Tower of the Basilica Magna had been wrecked itself, by errant fire from the Casturian side, collapsing back down through the vaulted roof of the cathedral. Lt. Agusta edged his head around the corner towards the road leading to Market Square to look for the signs of the Tsadean company that had been dug in there. Nothing. A droplet of rain fell from his standard issue helmet onto his nose and stung hard. Agusta yelped and turned back into the alcove, quickly emptying the canteen over his face to clean away the biting acid that had arrived with the storm. A huge flash of purple lightening illuminated the scene. Lt. Agusta’s troops were ten men and women of the Casturian PDF, white ceremonial uniforms soiled with dirt, grease and blood, black braid ripped away. Lt. Agusta turned. He had heard something up the street, towards the Bishopric Palace end of the road. He grabbed an empty ration tin Trooper Kesar had been idling with and put it out to protect his head as he leaned into the acid rain. Dark shadows were moving before the orange haze of the Palace. Agusta noted the irregular, flickering shapes, and then heard the chanting: the Mutatis.
“Company sir?” said Cpl Granicus, edging along under the alcove to stand beside him.
“Yes praise the Emperor” He turned back: “they’ve breached the Aplonian Wall, I know none of you want to retreat but staying here is not an option.”
Ten white uniformed, tired draftees of the Castur’s Planet PDF looked at him, eyes expectant, grips tightening on antique autoguns issued from an obscure Stores Vault at Camp Venktion when the supply of lasguns had run out. Forty draft regiments had been added to the one hundred reservists already called, wearing ceremonial uniforms or inappropriate uniforms of other services or ranks. They’d received a five hour drill in combat and then been sent to the walls of Gloda Bridge Bishopric to hold the defences with the regular Casturian PDF, troops of the Imperial Guard, and Skitarii of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The Imperials had tanks, artillery, heavy weapons, air support, Legio Cyber maniples, autoturrets, and even according to the Mechanicus a Titan of the revered Legio Venator . It had not been enough. The Mutatis had daemons and psykers.
“See the hole in the Pilgrims’ Hostelry? We climb the rubble pile, go though, drop down behind the old water troughs opposite Starside Inn in the Square, then try and break through on the Tsadean’s side to the Gloda Road. We’ll get to Keever Level Spaceport, if we don’t dawdle,” he said with a slight grin. The soldiers looked a little more relaxed.
“Cpl Granicus, take all the grenades you can carry, take Vereno and Marcus, hold them for a little while and then join us. We’ll give you cover from the Hostelry first floor.” Nods, unbuckling of grenades from belts. “Emperor’s speed.” He tapped the first trooper on the Market Square side on the side of her helmet. “Go, go, go.”
And to think, thought Marto Agusta, turning to the Basilica behind him, it was only last week I was training to be a curate here.
*
Twenty Years Ago
Grandpa Arick’s farm was in a low valley that bordered and dipped into the Mertaz-East Great Woodland. Grandpa Arick’s family had lived for several generations in the woodlands as gatherers of firewood for sale in Liopolli and squatting farmers on common land. Arik’s fourth oldest son Kracitus Agusta, Marto’s father, had been taken from at the age of 15 to join the Mertaz legions sent to persecute the heretics of the Ycamprese Islands, who refused to build bridges to honour the The Bridgebuilder but instead worshipped their ancestors and spirits of stone and glade. Kracitus Agusta returned a rich man, a three year veteran with rank and title, and purchased a small house in a good plaza of Liopolli, Mertaz-East’s provincial capital. The Agustas became a minor noble family involved in the trading of grain and millet, but Grandpa Arick would not be persuaded to move too far from his forest home. He grudgingly accepted a small farmhouse, a little land, and grey speckled chickens of a strain Marto’s father had imported from the Ycamprese scratch country. And now they were being eaten by centilids.
Marto rushed out of the house after shouting for his grandfather (His parents let Marto stay there sometimes at weekends). He swung a farm implement at the segmented, clacking, insectoid that reared up from the barbed fence it was biting into. It bit the end of the scythe off and worried it with its mandibles. Two were slithering around inside the chicken pen, burrowed up from holes beneath the wire, a bloody pulp of grey speckled feathers being nuzzled between them. Crack. One centilid stopped moving and flipped over, its hundred tiny white legs waving in the air then going still. The other one in the pen climbed to the roof of the chicken coop. Crack. Its head segment blew off, flying against the wire opposite Marti, causing him to belatedly drop to the ground. He was face to face with the live one outside, inches from his face, mandibles opening, bulging mirrored eyes shining. A shadow descended. There was an earthy crunch. A rake held by Grandpa Arick had pierced the centilid, pinning it to the ground. Marto inched back; the centilid looked somehow surprised, if not a little sad. Grandpa Arick chopped it into squirming pieces with the heavy cleaver he used for slaughtering chicken. “By the bridge,” he said, as Marto’s father, two of his brothers, his mother, and three sisters came walking down the valley path, hunting rifle in his father’s hand, “didn’t you try and wake me?”
-
They all sat down, and this is what Marto’s father told the family:
Castur’s Planet had been contacted by the Imperium of Man. Castur’s Planet had been a colony, a Frontier World of the Imperium in what was a region called The Margins between the Scarus and the Calixis Sectors, huge volumes of space holding hundreds of worlds and billions of people. A fast Imperial spaceship, commanded by someone called Trader-Captain Uriel Markovitz, was coming to Castur’s Planet to formally re-enfold it into the Imperium. The god most Casturians worshipped, The Bridgebuilder, was a living man called The Emperor of Mankind, his religion was the Imperial Creed, which Casturians followed in a debased form, and his subjects were coming to The Margins to free it from darkness and return it to the light. The Casturians would be offered the opportunity to join this Margins Crusade, as suppliers of materials and as soldiers in His Imperial Guard. Trader-Captain Markovitz and his vessel would arrive at Castur’s Planet from the edge of the Lougarno System in two weeks. All this had been conveyed by unknown means to the Seers of the Weeping Bridge at Casturiana, the world’s capital. The Seers were widely believed and respected. Astronomers reported no strange portents in the sky but begged to keep Protector-Eternal Constantinus informed of all development.
Grandpa Arick snorted. “By the “Emperor”, what a load of old prattle.”
-
Ten years ago
Curate-in-training Marto Agusta had walked to the very edge of Gloda Bishopric, to the high stone barrier that looked down into the rushing waters of the River Glo far below on the valley floor. Gloda Bishopric had been one of the purest expressions of the Cult of the Bridgebuilder, a whole town supported on a monumental stone bridge built over a sheer drop to the rushing torrents of Castur’s Planet’s widest, fastest river. Behind him were all the landmarks visible to everyone who dwelled on the Mertaz-East valley floor and plains beyond: the Basilica Magna, with its ancient leaning Alto-Rymean Tower; the sloping wooden sides of the Bishopric Palace; the new Office of the Adeptus Administratum, and beyond, connected by the Gloda Road to an artificially levelled plateau, Keever Level Spaceport, a slightly hapzard mix of towers, supports, and landing pads, one of Castur’s Planets five Imperial spaceports. Marto gazed into the water below, crashing whites and blues.
“By the Bri- By the Emperor, how’s the priest’s game treating you Marto?”
He turned. It was his eldest brother, Lucard, a Captain of the Casturian PDF, XI Division (Glodalia Parcel), wearing his white dress uniform with the black braids and shiny silver aquila cap badge on his hat. He came to stand next to him.
“Still… thinking it over Luc.”
“You know what I think, you’re an Agusta, not cut out for mumbling. Join the Imperial Guard like me, or at least the PDF. It’s what father would have wanted.”
Stupid, brave brother Luc. First name on the list to join the Casturian 1 st Infantry regiment of the Imperial Guard. A captaincy in the PDF would carry over into the Guard.
“The things our Commisar’s been telling us about atrocities in the Rhettian Isthmus, about heretics in the Witch’s Haze, and the tek-lords of Syncobar, and the foul xenos, especially these things they call Orks. Right here in the Rhettian. Who’d have believed it ten years ago eh?”
Luc fiddled with a tunic button. Marto decided to tell him. “I’ve got a girl pregnant, a pauper’s daughter from Sinestria in the north. If I leave she and the child may fall into harm; if I stay and make it known the Agusta family falls into disgrace, a curate with a scandalous past.”
Luc held his level gaze at him, eyes partially obscured by his cap.
“I’m going to stay on in the priesthood, send donations her way, make sure things stay alright. Emperor **** this situation.” He gazed out over the cascading river.
“Here.” Luc offered him a thin green stick in some kind of organic leaf wrapping. “Our colonel’s from some planet called Malfi, it sounds absolutely ghastly but they import these from some even worse place called Strank.” They smoked as the sun started to set behind Mt. Gloda behind them and the town.
“Whatever you decide is best little brother. Of course I expect Narsilla will remarry, but she’ll keep the family shrine going for the children’s sake. Don’t begrudge it to her.” He dropped the stub of green chutes and crushed it beneath his boot. “May even come back, like father did, buy”, he swept his arms, “this whole valley.”
He turned to walk back to the city, hand outstretched to his brother.
“Whatever you think is the right thing.”
*
One month ago
Lt. Marto Agusta was crammed into a white ceremonial uniform for a Captain of the Casturian PDF tailored a size smaller than he was. His autogun had come from a crate dropped off by the enterprising Trader-Captain Markovitz in exchange for offworld rights to Casturian agricultural produce, and then promptly consigned to a storage bin when Castur’s Planet had formed a peaceful and stable unitary world government. The overland train was rushing down from Meratz-North to reinforce beleaguered forces trapped between the mountains and the sea in the Glodial Parcel. Lt. Agusta sat in the lead traincars dining car with north Meratzian officers, part of the Emergency Reserve 7 th , the reserves to the world’s reverse; snowfields and forests flicked by.
“I say, Agusta” said Colonel Brigante when the shells burst through the windows and killed everyone but Agusta, who had been reaching to pick an item of cutlery from the floor, three servants, who had crouched behind the train car’s drinks bar for cover. The dark v of a Mutatis propeller bomber rocketed across the sky past the other side of the carriage, going up and turning around for another pass. Where the hell were the roof gunners? Agusta simultaneously hit the Emergency Halt button and opened the door to a gust of icy air at the car’s rear. Several Mutatis fighters were on the roof, long bloodied knives being pulled out of the bodies of the gunnery crew. The propeller bomber turned towards the train. The Mutatis fighter was a swirl of purple and pink rags draped over an asymmetrical form still wearing the excrement-stained camo fatigues of a Casturian PDF regular. It turned and its face was a swirl of features arranged around a grinning vertical mouth slit. It raised the knife not in a hand but an insectile claw. It took a step forward, supported by a feathering wing where its right leg had been and a wooden peg visible though the filthy robes that had replaced the left. Agusta shot it though the face with his autogun and then did the same more for three more Mutatis fighters, none exactly like the other. The train shuddered to a halt as the propeller bomber dived in, unleashing a torpedo that hurtled towards the main carriages.
“On foot” shouted Agusta, banging the wood panel doors of the nearest train car. “On foot to Gloda, it’s our only chance!”
The torpedo landed in the rear of the overland train. It hit the munitions car.
-
The train Agusta was on was a troop train. The insurrection had started off innocuously as a fashion for strange and eccentric clothing, body paints, and modifications swept through Casturian society. The Adeptus Ministorum announced a crackdown on moral standards and soon two parcels were in revolt. People were seen to meet in doorways, on rooftops, and in open fields at strange times. Conversations could be weirdly discordant with what was actually being discussed. Strangers appeared in provincial towns bringing tales of miracle cures and new Imperial cults. By the time the Casturian PDF were mobilised three of Castur’s Planet’s six continents were in full or partial revolt, accounting for 93 parcels and perhaps several million who joined the “Colour Revolt.” The revolutionaries wore multi-coloured robes and were preached against by Ministorum clergy as heretics, subversives, campaigners for liberality. Privately Agusta had some sympathy for such a point of view, having to weather a storm of clerical rebuke when he had left Gloda Bishopric to marry Livnia in Sinestria and start a family there. Once newspicts of the debauched atrocities in the revolting provinces came out however, and it became clear the Mutatis, as the physically and mentally altered were known, were worshippers of Chaos, Agusta went straight to Camp Venktion and signed up, joining as a lieutenant.
“Luc Agusta’s brother, Colonel Agusta?” the recruiting clerk said, speaking in the flat metallic tones of one who had had his entire neck replaced with an Adeptus Mechanicus cybernetic component. “We served in the Glorious 1 st on Narvik together, we gave those Orks hell for what they did to our ships in orbit, to your brother.” He rubbed his hands down the metal tube connecting his head and body. “Sure gave some hell,” he said absent-mindedly.
They all paraded. The call for reinforcements from the Margins Crusade had been answered, and three regiments had been dispatched from what could be spared from the ailing crusade, for even on Castur’s Planet is what known the Imperium was losing its battle here against renegades, xenos, and the chaos worshippers. Calixian troops from Tsade II and Grove’s Fall were arrayed in neat lines of infantry; mechanised troops from the Ixaniadine world of Qoreta Proxime stood atop or beside their armoured troop carriers. The Groveans came from a Hive World but were not the animalistic narco-gangers he’d been told to expect, instead seeming to be tall, rangey, and of a fairly good humour. The Qoretans were different: unlike the Casturians they were all one colour, a patchwork of pale and darkish yellows, black spots, and clear patches of white were synth-skin had been grafted on. A Qoretan officer told him Qoreta Proxima was an Industrial World exposed to deadly chemicals and solar radiation and dying for a world as picturesque as Castur’s Planet would be a pleasure. The Tsadeans were the weirdest of all, hailing from an Agri World deep in thrall to the Adeptus Mechanicus. The Tsadeans were tall, pale, and all sported the mechanical upgrades to optimise their farm home’s tithe quota production. Nearby a tall Tsadean officer flexed the piston-driven bladed scoop that replaced her right forearm, the left hand resting on a bolt-pistol marked in Mechanicus red and silver. Far, far away, General Maiorucs on a podium was delivering a speech to the troops organised into the 3 rd Army Group. It started to rain. It sizzled as it fell.
*
Agusta gave up on Trooper Tancredi, the falling masonry had killed her instantly, scrambling the inside of her skull. A dozen Mutatis infiltrators and six of his troopers lay dead on the narrow mountain path to Keever Field. He gingerly kicked the nearest Mutatis corpse over the side into the valley: this one possessed no visible head, nine limbs, and a set of leathery batwings. Agusta, Cpl Granicus, and Troopers Kesar, Vereno, Marcus were all that had made it out of Gloda Bishopric alive, the Market Plaza turned into a crossfire deathtrap by advancing Mutatis and artillery fire. The Tsadeans had been wiped out, the last few clustered around the mutilated body of the Tsadean officer he’d seen at the parade ground days ago, a colonel he realised. They’d all slipped through a crack in the wall and edged along to the Keever Level path as Mutatis troops and undisciplined hordes of cultists and mutants surged up the walls and through the broken gates. Weird, dancing forms, part flame, part light, which he recognised as daemons, played and gambled about in the sky as the bridge town burned. They made it to the bridge unseen when Mutatis, clinging to the underside like limpets, swung up and made bloody work of five of the soldiers with their teeth, claws, and implements of rusted metal. It had been poor luck that the piece of ornate masonry lining the path, a shrine to the ancients, Cpl Granicus backed into fell and gave Tancredi a fatal blow to the head, after she had taken out five of the abominations personally at close quarters with her autogun. They were nearly there. Their last orders had been to hold the city long enough for sappers to sabotage the spaceport and deny its use to the enemy. Blinking lights were still taking off from the spaceport, dodging enemy flak and heading to the polar south where skies were still reportedly clear, taking troops to a last ditch defence of the Polar South Spaceport. He turned around to look at Gloda Bishopric one last time. The ruins of the Basilica Magna were glowing. His vision went red and his nose, mouth and other orifices gushed blood. He fell and saw It, rising from the swirling dense glowing green smoke of the Basilica. He heard the chanting of thousands say one word: “Tzeentch, Tzeentch, Tzeentch, Tzeentch.” It was here on Castur’s World, the Lord of Change.
Things happened quickly. Kesar stopped, turned, and ran back down the path into the city. Vereno tried desperately to scrabble up the cliff wall in the direction of the spaceport, slipped, and fell screaming to the valley floor. Marcus picked up a fallen Mutatis metal shard and calmy drew it across his throat, collapsing in a blood-soaked heap with the red gash across his neck open to the stormy purple sky. Agusta sat down, dumbstruck. It was impossible to describe what he was seeing, it seemed to be standing in the valley, feet stride the river, hands resting on the sides of the bridge city, shoulders and head almost reaching the snow-capped peak of Mt. Gormo. It was avian, reptilian, cephalopod, mammalian, insectoid, mollusc, rock, water, steam, gas, smoke, living star stuff. It roared and Agusta balled up into the smallest shape he could make himself. He felt a pulling. Cpl Erock Granicus was dragging him up the mountain path as fast as possible. The Lord of Change swept his hands at some passing Imperial shuttles: they turned into bloated shellfish like creatures, each supported by gossamer wings with their mouths full of the screaming mshed parts of humans who had been in the shuttle’s interior. The former shuttles fell to the valley floor with a soft wet thump. There was a mighty boom, a hammer blow against the world. He was striding up the valley. A macrocannon shell the size of the former Bishopric Palace crashed into the mountain face behind the Greater Daemon. Insignia Rex , pride of the Legio Venator , purposefully strode uphill, green energy shield crackling and cannons and lasers raking the Mutatis forces encamped on the valley floor. The Lord of Change moved forward. With its hands it tore Gloda Bishopric apart, the houses, chapels, flagstones, and flaming wreckage of its Basilica and Palace tumbling to the valley floor. The Greater Daemon walked over the trapped pleading bodies of its own cultists trapped in the rubble as it ran at the Titan, which was powering up its deadliest forward weaponry. Agusta was suddenly aware what was happening. Two stubby outcroppings were all that was left of a city where Agusta had spent the better part of his life, where many of his friends and family lived. He grabbed hold of Granicus and together sprinted to the spaceport. They found the last sappers there, Casturian PDF who had managed to not witness It’s coming. They boarded the last shuttle and went. Moments later Glodalia Parcel ceased to exist, a nuclear shockwave throwing an insignificant black speck of an Imperial shuttle craft high up into the atmosphere and on its way to the last Imperial defenders at the southern end of Castur’s Planet. A blooming mushroom cloud caused an early dawn amid the chaotic shell sealing the world, heralding the cyclonic torpedoes that were to thud through the planetary crust in eighteen hours’ time to prevent Castur’s Planet becoming a Daemon World.
The authorities of the Calixis Sector quietly declared the Margins Crusade lost. Millions of troops, ships, and supplies had been expended to seize a dozen worlds that were too distant and too surrounded by enemies to ever be realistically held. The last report of the Margin Crusaders was of xenos, chaos, mutants, and renegades closing in on all sides. Candles were lit in the Adeptus Ministorum temples of Scintilla before troop transports and mass cargo conveyors were turned Rimward towards the far Achilus Crusade.
-
In an airless vault somewhere near the grey surface dust deserts of the Forge World Opus Macharius, a techpriest switched off its plasma-torch to inspect, the name and epitaph it had added to the side of the Great Wall of Remembrance: Insignia Rex, Gloria Mortis, Castur’s Planet 787.M41. For a second the techpriest allowed itself to reflect, cogitate on the ways of the Omnissiah. Then it started to add another name to wall.
Edited by glyph21