[Imperial Guard 03] - Rebel Winter Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  REBEL WINTER

  Imperial Guard - 03

  Steve Parker

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  To Mum and Dad, with love and gratitude.

  Additional thanks to Kev for his faith,

  and to Kana for her kindness.

  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 gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass 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.

  Amongst the Emperor’s many servants, waging His eternal war are the Imperial Guard. Harnessed from countless worlds across the galaxy, their numbers are legion. From the ice-wreathed factory world of Vostroya come the Firstborn. They are a noble race, a warrior brotherhood ruled over by the Techtriarchs and worship both the Immortal Emperor and the Machine God of Mars. In maintaining the fighting strength of their regiments with continuous replacements, they honour the ancient pact they swore with the Emperor long ago. The Vostroyans are master artificers, who supply the many armies of humanity with munitions, their own regiments bearing handcrafted weapons of exceptional quality. Stoic, resolute, experts in fighting in the most adverse of conditions, the Vostroyan Firstborn regard themselves as more dedicated than any other Imperial Guard regiment and as such are fierce foes, but even fiercer allies in what is a war-torn galaxy.

  Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. 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 gods.

  “Secession — let a single rebel world go unpunished and countless more will rise up, all clamouring for those religious and economic freedoms better known to loyal citizens of the Imperium as heresy and ingratitude.

  “On Danik’s World, the seeds of rebellion were planted in the deep snows of an ice age that ravaged the planet for two thousand years. It began when volcanic eruptions on the southern continent filled the atmosphere with debris and plunged the land into darkness. The sudden climatic change wiped out over half the human population and reduced planetary productivity to almost nothing. On countless occasions in the years that followed, one loyalist governor after another begged the Administratum for aid. Eventually, the Administratum approved the deferment of Imperial tributes, but more direct aid in the form of food and technologies was repeatedly denied. Imperial coffers, the Danikkin were told, were being drained by anti-xenos campaigns throughout the segmentum.

  “When Danikkin scientists finally announced the beginning of a slow return to warmer temperatures, the population had climbed to two-thirds of its pre-catastrophe figure. An estimated ninety-three per cent of that population supported open revolt against the Imperium. The central figure behind this movement was Lord General Graush Vanandrasse, High Commander of the Danikkin Planetary Defense Force.

  “Vanadrasse had spent his life rising through the ranks of the PDF, finally attaining absolute command at the age of sixty-one. Mere months after his accession, he led his forces in a bloody coup against troops loyal to the Planetary Governor. He celebrated victory by renaming his force the Danikkin Independence Army. To ensure absolute loyalty to his vision of planetary independence, he established a brutal organization of elite officers called the Special Patriotic Service.

  “Agents of this so-called Special Patriotic Service publicly executed the legitimate Planetary Governor and his family, and sent a formal notice of secession to the Administratum.

  “Two years later, in 766.M41, Lord Marshal Graf Harazahn of the Vostroyan Firstborn — then charged with overseeing all ground operations in the Second Kholdas War — relented before pressure from the Administratum and agreed to send a small punitive force to Danik’s World. Twelfth Army was formed for this purpose and deployed under the leadership of General Vogor Vlastan — a man for whom Harazahn allegedly bore little genuine respect.

  “Twelfth Army’s orders were to crush the Danikkin rebels, restore order, and return to action in the Second Kholdas War with all due haste. As the old adage goes, however, few plans survive first contact with the enemy.

  “The climate and the rebels were bad enough, and Twelfth Army underestimated both. But there was another force present on Danik’s World for which General Vlastan and his Guardsmen were unprepared — a force that would claim all too many of Vostroya’s firstborn sons.

  “The old foe, you see, had got there first.”

  Extract: Hammer and Shield: Collected Essays on the History of the Second Kholdas War, eds. Commissar-Colonel (Ret.) Keisse von Holh (716.M41-805.M41) & Major (Ret.) Wyllum Imrilov (722.M41-793.M41)

  A TRIAL BEGINS

  The Exedra Udiciarum Seddisvarr was a grand place indeed, as grand and dark as an Imperial mausoleum. The ancient court had stood for millennia, echoing with the sounds of innumerable trials, both military and civil. Stylised images of the God-Emperor and His saints stared with unblinking eyes from great stained-glass windows, weighing the souls of the innocent and the guilty.

  Tapestries hung from the dark marble walls, their fading colours straggling to contrast the aura of the room: here, an image of Tech-Magos Benandanti, who’d rediscovered the Kholdas Cluster in M37 and restored it to its rightful place in the Imperial fold; there, Saint Hestor, who’d led loyalist forces against the dread armies of the Idols Dark, which had spilled from the warpstorm at the cluster’s centre in M39. Around these worthy historical figures, pre-Winter Danikkin iconography spoke of better days, days before the people had turned from their God-Emperor’s light.

  Had the faith of these people remained unbroken, the Vostroyan Firstborn might never have set foot on Danik’s World. Dead men might yet live. Then again, thought Captain Grigorius Sebastev, as well to die on this world as on some other, so long as one dies well.

  As commanding officer of the Firstborn Sixty-Eighth Infantry Regiment’s Fifth Company, Sebastev went where his Emperor needed him. It was as simple as that. For now, he stood patiently in the dock, awaiting the beginning of his trial, uncomfortable and self-conscious in his ill-fitting dress uniform.

  He was a stocky man, short for a Vostroyan, but thickset and powerful. In the days since his return to Command HQ in Seddisvarr, with solid meals and little to do in his cell but practise the forms of the ossbokh-vyar, he’d quickly regained the size and strength he’d lost since being posted to the Eastern Front. His bright red jacket, piped with shining gold brocade, strained to contain the thick muscles of his chest and back.

  He’d have given anything for the familiar comfort of battle fatigues and a greatcoat. Strutting and posturing like the highborn officers had never interested him. Sebastev was a fighter, a brawler. His men called him the Pit-Dog, though rarely to his face since it tended to ignite his temper.

  A dozen servo-skulls drifted overhead, carrying braziers filled with hot coals, but the air would hardly be warmer by the time the judges took their seats. That would set them in foul spirits from the outset. No matter. His future was in the Emperor’s hands, as it had always been.

  Sebastev shifted his gaze to the most central of the hall’s windows and looked up at the glowing image of the Emperor. “Light of all Mankind,” he said, uncaring that the bailiffs behind him would hear, I’ve lived my life on the battlefield, serving your will. “Let me die doing so.”

  S
omeone coughed off to Sebastev’s right, and echoes chased each other up the stone walls to the shadowy reaches of the high ceiling. Sebastev turned.

  “Really, captain,” said a man sitting alone on the observers’ benches, “must you be so gloomy this early in the morning?”

  It was the commissar. He looked well rested, healthy. A few days away from the fighting had taken the sunken look from his cheeks. His oiled black hair shone as it had when they’d first met. The ubiquitous cap, the symbol of the man’s rank, sat neatly on the bench by his side.

  “Commissar,” said Sebastev with a nod. He was surprised to note a feeling of comfort at the man’s presence. No matter what transpired during this hearing, the commissar had been right there in the thick of things. He’d played his part and knew the truth. But how would he testify? For all they’d been through together, the man was still something of an unknown quantity to Sebastev. He was brave enough, yes, and had demonstrated his dedication and loyalty to the Emperor, but he was also chevek, an outsider, a non-Vostroyan. The minds of such men were frustratingly difficult to comprehend.

  A flicker of movement on the balcony above the benches caught Sebastev’s eye. He lifted his gaze from the commissar and saw a curious duo sitting in the balcony’s front row. Two figures diametrically opposed in bearing stared back at him, a man and a woman, though the term “man” seemed hardly adequate to describe the former.

  The woman sat hunched, almost drowning in the black folds of her robe. Her back was bent, her body twisted with age. She appeared no larger than a child of ten, but from the shadows of her cowl, her eyes shone with wisdom and a sharp intellect.

  Was she Danikkin? An off-worlder? The sight of her made Sebastev uncomfortable, but he couldn’t fathom why.

  Next to the crone, dwarfing her utterly, sat a man who seemed nothing less than a statue cut from living marble. His skin was the white of daylit snow, and his spotless robes did little to mask the gargantuan body beneath. He was absolutely hairless, reinforcing the illusion of stone construction, but that illusion was shattered when Sebastev met the man’s gaze. His eyes were blood-red, even where they should have been white.

  Sebastev had never seen such a figure, so ghostly and yet so overwhelmingly solid, in all his travels across the Imperium of Man. Who were these people? And what in the blasted warp were they doing at this trial?

  He might have asked them had the silence not been shattered at that moment. Doors banged as they were thrown open, and the air filled with the tumult of booted feet on marble flooring. A mixed crowd of Munitorum staff and Vostroyan military personnel poured into the room, chattering loudly as they took their seats.

  Sebastev scanned the crowd for familiar faces, but could find no sign of his men. He wasn’t surprised. In all likelihood, Old Hungry, or General Vogor Vlastan, as the bastard was more properly known, had forbidden their presence among the spectators. Sebastev turned his eyes from the crowd and faced forward, just in time to see the door of the judges’ chambers crack open. A wash of warmth and orange light spilled into the hall. The general’s military judiciary entered slowly and in single file.

  Sebastev couldn’t keep a scowl from his face as his eyes tracked the bloated figure of the general. He was a ruin of a man, confined to a multi-legged mechanical chair wired directly to his nerves via data-plugs at the base of his skull. The chair carried him to his place at the judges’ bench with smooth, spider-like movements.

  Sebastev raised his right hand to his brow in a sharp but grudging salute.

  “In the name of the Emperor,” called the court secretary, “all rise!”

  The people on the spectators’ benches clattered to their feet, and the trial of Captain Grigorius Sebastev began.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Day 681

  Korris Trenchworks — 08:59hrs, -25°C

  Morning at the Eastern Front began, as it most often did, with the dark sky shifting from midnight blue to slate-grey. Down on the ground, everything turned a brilliant white. Only regular clearance work prevented the heavy snow from filling the Vostroyan trenches. Out here, eight kilometres east of the town proper, the only true shelter to be found was in the dugouts that the engineering teams had cut into the frozen earth. If Sebastev lived through this campaign — and the odds were against it, given the wretched state of things — he was sure he’d remember it, not for the fury of the warp-damned orks or the desperation of the filthy rebels, but for the relentless assault of the Danikkin deep winter.

  Icy winds gusted down the firing trench, catching the snow as it fell, and hurling it against his men with a fury that was almost human. Fur hats and cloaks became coated on their windward side. But the Vostroyan Firstborn had weathered worse in their time. It would take more than the Danikkin ice-age to shake their commitment to the fight. Vostroyan pride was at stake here.

  Sebastev moved up to the firing step, raised his head over the lip of the trench and peered out between coils of rusting razorwire and sandbags frozen hard as rock. The deep winter had pulled powdery blankets over yesterday’s dead, and there was little evidence of the violence that had shaken the earth. Only irregular mounds of snow on the otherwise level battlefield hinted at the multitude of dead xenos that lay beneath.

  Given the uniform white that lay before him, it was hard to believe a battle had been fought here at all: no scorched ground, no smoking craters. Yet, barely twenty hours ago, Sebastev had led his men in a bloody defence of these very trenches.

  Here he was again, called back from the warmth of his bunk after First Company scouts had alerted the regiment to a massing of enemy forces beyond the tree line to the east. Tired as they were, those off-duty had quickly reassembled to face the inevitable attack.

  The orks, damn them all, seemed impervious to the deep winter.

  On either side of Sebastev, the trenches snaked off north and south into the snow veiled distance, filled with men in greatcoats of deep red, cinched under plates of polished golden armour. These were his men, the men of the Sixty-Eighth Infantry Regiment’s Fifth Company. They stamped their feet on the frozen planking of the trench floor, and rubbed gloved hands over their weapons to keep the mechanisms from freezing. Their pockets bulged with lasgun power packs waiting to be loaded at the last minute so that the cold of the open air wouldn’t leech their valuable charge.

  There were three hundred and thirty-eight men at the last count, spread across five platoons. He’d started with four hundred. Twenty-two had been lost since the last reinforcements had come in. Those same reinforcements accounted for most, but not all, of the recently deceased. That was the way of things in the Guard, of course. Those with the right stuff lived to fight on. As far as most officers were concerned, the rest were just cannon fodder.

  Sebastev pulled his scarf down for a moment, so he could scratch his face where the coarse hair of his moustache was itching. The bitter air nipped at his exposed skin. Every face around him was covered against the cold, some with warm scarves, others with rebreather masks that offered better protection against the elements, but reduced peripheral vision. Sebastev had always allowed his men a certain amount of freedom in the way they configured their gear. Each man knew himself best, after all. Even so, he’d have welcomed the chance to read their expressions as they readied themselves for the inevitable ork assault.

  Stand strong, he thought. You’re tired, cold and hungry, I know, but in three more days, we’ve a duty rotation. Hold fast until then.

  He knew there would be mistakes brought on by exhaustion, and decided to order extra checks on cold climate discipline. Pneumonia and frostbite were constant threats on this world. The deep winter stalked every man, waiting for simple mistakes, for chances to claim the lives of the careless.

  Early in the conflict, the youngest and greenest Guardsmen in the Twelfth Army had suffered in depressingly high numbers. Frostbite: for some it was lips or noses, for others it was fingers or toes. The flesh became numb, then shrivelled and turned black. If the dead flesh
didn’t fall away first, the medics would cut it off. Many of the afflicted didn’t need scarves and goggles now. They wore permanent masks, expressionless machine faces screwed into the bone of their skulls by the regiment’s techpriests and the chirurgeons of the Imperial Medicae.

  Twelfth Army Command had since made instances of frostbite a capital offence, but flogging men for losing a finger or two didn’t sit well with Sebastev. He preferred to omit the mention of it from his reports. Since Fifth Company had yet to be assigned a replacement commissar, Sebastev dealt with most infractions in his own way. For frostbite, it meant the confiscation of alcohol or tabac. For other offences, it meant a stint as his sparring partner.

  Sebastev tried to gauge the mood of the men around him. Despite their being covered from head to toe against the razor winds, it wasn’t all that hard to sense their agitation. Their bodies were in continuous motion, keeping their joints loose and their blood pumping in readiness for combat. It kept them warm. Many were veterans who, like Sebastev, had opted to serve beyond their ten years of compulsory service. Such men would have sensed the coming storm of battle just as he had.

  He raised his magnoculars and squinted into the lenses, picking out the tree line just over a kilometre east of his position. The heavy curtains of falling snow hampered his view, but the shadows beneath the trees stood out as a dark border in all that white, marking the far edge of the killing fields. As he adjusted the magnification, bringing the wall of pine into sharper focus, he thought he glimpsed motion between the black trunks.

  Lieutenant Tarkarov was right, he thought. We should have cut the trees farther back. We’ve no idea just how many are massing there.

  After watching for another minute with no further sign of movement, Sebastev returned his magnoculars to the case on his belt.