lance. The continuous, crashing gunfire of the battery. The impending boarding action. The armada without end, Chaos vessels passing behind and about the lone defence monitor. The ships would be on an unswerving course for Certus-Minor – where from low orbit the Cholercaust fleet would launch an apocalyptic landing, its Thunderhawks, drop-ships, pods, lighters, barges, carriers, haulage skiffs and junkers numerous enough to black out the stars. From this nightmare ramshackle of craft a vast army of insane blood-crusaders would spill. Cultists, Chaotics, daemons and Traitor Angels. Uncountable. Unstoppable.
The lieutenant’s lip curled. ‘Are we at ramming speed?’
The young Randt looked at her grimly.
‘Almost, lieutenant.’
‘I want to hit her amidships, do you understand, Mister Randt?’ Heiss said. The midshipman nodded. Heiss stared at the fat transport towards which they were streaking with the queasy certainty of a torpedo. Heiss licked her lips. ‘I want to break her back…’
Chapter Seventeen
Unto Dust
The shovel bit into the cemetery world grit. Woodes Sprenger had been a grave fosser his whole life. Under his sweat-soaked shirt and dust-coat he was tough and lean; he handled his spade with speed and a working man’s determination. Tossing earth up out of the grave with hypnotic rhythm, the fosser’s blade finally hit metal. Scraping off the rusty surface of the stasis casket, Woodes kicked footholds into the side of the grave and used the tip of the shovel to prise open the coffin.
The stench of stale death rose to meet the Certusian. He coughed and covered his mouth. Reaching up for his gas-lamp by the graveside, Woodes brought it down to explore the coffin’s contents. This was borderline sacrilege for the grave fosser, whose job – like thousands of others – was to bury the dead sent to reside in the sacred cemetery world earth and dig up caskets whose tenure had expired to make way for further cadaver arrivals. Only the wealthy and advantaged could afford a plot on Certus-Minor. They were buried, the stasis-field generators on their sarcophagi deactivated and removed, and the dead allowed to rot in peace – as cemetery world custom dictated. Common fossers never went into the coffins – only grave robbers ever did. In this way, breaking the seals and prising open the casket went against every fibre of Woodes’s spiritual being, and he would not have been doing so – even given the dire circumstances on Certus-Minor – unless the pontifex himself and the Emperor’s Angels had given the order.
Inside the casket Woodes found the remains of a woman. A desiccated skeleton buried in the copious material of an extravagant grave gown. Woodes expected that she was spire nobility from some distant hive-world. The bones of her fingers were adorned with the precious metal and stone of rings, and the vertebrae of her neck were a tangled nest of priceless jewellery. The empty sockets of her skull leered up at the grave fosser and Woodes coughed again. Leaning in close, Woodes checked the system of wires running down the depth of the grave between the sculpted tombstone and the casket. Pulling the wire cord, Woodes set off the mournful peal of the bell positioned in the decorative detail of the marker.
Against the tombstone Woodes saw his weapon, the autorifle he’d been issued – with the scuff-scratched stock, crescent clips and long barrel shroud. The noisy weapon that had saved his life and those of others during the first battlement assaults. With Donalbain he’d held his ground, despite wanting to run from the terror and madness with his fellow fossers and Certusians.
Climbing out of the grave in a well-practised motion, Woodes picked up a small stone from the surrounding soil and posted it through the mouth of a cherubim crafted in the stone. He heard the tinny clatter of the stone as it fell down through the metal pipe connecting the tombstone to the casket and providing it with an air source.
Checking such safety mechanisms was usually the verger’s duty. Personally, Woodes had only been present at one premature exhumation. It had been in the Asphodel-East field close to where Woodes had lived. He had been summoned from his shack by Father Deodat, a passing preacher who had heard a bell from the lychway. Father Deodat, Woodes, Donalbain and several other fossers from the cenopost searched for the marker and sent for shovels before proceeding to dig up the grave on the preacher’s orders. The bell rang incessantly, and within the casket the cemetery worlders found an Imperial Guard officer – a dragoon in full dress uniform – who had been buried with his plumed helmet and gleaming sabre. The officer had been confused, claustrophobic and out of his mind with fear. In the darkness of the sarcophagus his frantic fingers had found the wire cord, and after an experimental pull had produced the chime of the bell, the Guardsman had proceeded to ring it in the hope that someone would discover him.
Woodes never saw the Imperial Guard officer again. Father Deodat informed the fosser, however, that the officer had told him that he’d been part of an eradication force sent to the jungle world of Yasargil to exterminate the k’nib infestation there. The last thing the officer recalled was being stung by a hanging creeper and reporting to the camp infirmary. Deodat hypothesised that his subsequent paralysis was taken for death, and that the colonel’s body had been stasis-shipped from Yasargil to Pyra and from his home world to Certus-Minor. As the alien toxin wore off, the dragoon found himself confronted with the horror of being buried alive.
Nearby, Woodes heard the spade of his brother-in-law Donalbain crunch through the earth. Shovelfuls of dirt flew up out of a grave and landed in a neat pile next to the crisply cut hole. Donalbain was a fosser like Woodes and lived in the same cenopost hamlet.
‘This is insane…’ Woodes said to himself. He looked about him in the darkness. Nearby, cemetery worlders were dragging carts bearing barrels of promethium through the mounds of bodies that surrounded the city perimeter like a hillock or new battlement. The miserable teams pulled their carts through the corpse-piles of daemon insanity, pumping plungers and spraying the fallen nightmares with precious fuel.
‘It’s what the pontifex ordered,’ Donalbain said. Woodes hadn’t noticed the silence of the fosser’s shovel. Donalbain was taller than his brother-in-law and portlier around the belly; he’d worked up a significant sweat digging the grave so quickly. The Certusian noticed an Excoriators Space Marine stood upon the perimeter battlement, Obsequa City reaching up behind him. The Adeptus Astartes warrior watched them from the continuous mountain of rubble, casting his helmeted gaze up and down the line at other cemetery worlders hard at work clearing the dead and warped flesh of immaterial entities, and digging up graves. Donalbain shuddered. He had no idea how effective the Space Marine’s enhanced vision was in the darkness or, indeed, how good his hearing was. ‘The Angels ordered it also, so get back to work.’
Woodes thought of the thousands of graves being dug around the battlement perimeter. Graves that were situated where the necroplex met the city limits. Graves that had witnessed the worst of the fighting so far and been hidden beneath the daemon creatures storming the city as heavy gun emplacements and the blessed weapons of the Emperor’s Angels had ripped through them. ‘Insanity,’ he said again.
He watched two figures approach, picking their steps carefully through the gravestones, ichor-soaked earth and mangled bodies of the spawn-monstrosities. The first was his wife, Goody, dressed in her bonnet, shawl and fleece boots. Her face was soot-stained, tight and grim, but in that moment, with the grave at his feet and the shovel in his hand, she had never looked better to him. Goody had her arm around their daughter, Nyzette, and her delicate hand over the young girl’s eyes. She did not want the child to see the horror of the warped bodies through which they trudged. The child clutched a home-made rag doll of Saint Astrid to her. Woodes’s chest ached for the both of them. As they got closer, he walked to them, embracing both in his sinewy arms.
‘Papa!’ Nyzette said as she felt his lips against her forehead. He kissed Goody, holding both her and the child close to him – feeling a fearful passion for his wife that he hadn’t felt for a number of years.
‘Woodes…’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told her. ‘You will be safe and you’ll be together. That’s the important thing.’
‘Papa, stay with us,’ the young girl chided.
‘I can’t, my little blessing.’
‘No, papa…’
‘You must be strong and stay with your mother. You will hide and be safe, but papa must fight – you know,
