Cadia Stands Read online

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Prologue

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Part Two

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Part Three

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Part Four

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Shroud of Night’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  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.

  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 Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum 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 multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – 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 bloody 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 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.

  Prologue

  Borders of

  the Segmentum Obscurus

  She is four. It is time to learn.

  Her father lifts her into the night sky. On other planets, the vision above would be a velvet-black sky, the cold white light of ten thousand stars, or the strange beauty of a crescent moon. But she is Cadian, and the sky is not dark and star-studded; it glows with the swirling, lurid bruise of the Eye of Terror that stares back down like a cyclops’ orb. The only twinkle comes not from stars, but from reflected sunlight catching the adamantium plates of low-orbit defence platforms.

  She starts to tense. Sometimes the eye is purple, sometimes green, sometimes darker patches of unnamed colour. Her father’s voice brings her back.

  ‘That is the Eye of Terror. The prison of our enemy,’ he hisses. ‘We are the padlock that keeps them trapped. That is why they hate us.’

  ‘All of us?’ she asks.

  ‘All,’ he says.

  There is a long pause as she stares upwards. ‘Even Mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ he tells her, ‘even Mother.’

  There is a pause. She tastes blood in her throat. She wipes her nose and her finger comes away smeared with red. She cannot stop staring into the Eye even though she feels sick. She knows this is a test that she must pass, and she will not give up.

  ‘Does he hate me?’ she asks, sniffing the blood back.

  ‘Yes. The Despoiler hates you.’

  There is another pause. ‘He wants to take our world from us?’

  His voice is close to her ear. She can feel the breath of his words on her skin and in the tangled curls of her hair. He is passing on what he learned as a child. ‘The Despoiler wants our world to burn.’

  Vomit rises in her throat. She swallows the bile back, and stares deep into the darkest pits of the iris as if looking for a face there, a being to whom she can address her words. At first she sees nothing but then – there! – in the darkest patches of purple light, there is a plume of pale clouds.

  ‘What do you see?’ her father demands, but she cannot speak as she gasps for breath. His fingers are tight. ‘Speak, child. Have faith! The Emperor protects!’

  The breath comes with a sudden shock as blood begins to drip from her nostrils. ‘A face!’ she says, her voice beginning to break with fear. She squirms for a moment. She wants this to stop, but his hands are firm on her arms, and he holds her up for a little longer. ‘That is the Despoiler!’ he tells her and lifts her higher into the air. ‘What do you want to say to him, who hates us all and wants to burn our world?’

  Blood begins to pour from her nostrils. She will not look away. She will not give up. ‘Never,’ she says.

  ‘I cannot hear you.’

  ‘Never!’ she says, louder this time.

  ‘Tell him!’

  The child shouts up into the night sky. ‘Never! Never!’

  The father brings his daughter down and holds her tight against the chest sections of his flak armour. ‘W
ell done, child,’ he says and feels relief. It is not easy to expose a child to such things. He watches his daughter walk back to their hab.

  He is a Cadian and a father. He has done his duty.

  For her, the true test is yet to come.

  Part One

  The Summons

  One

  Orbit over Cadia

  Below them, the planet was poised half in light and half in darkness.

  Major Isaia Bendikt could not tell if a new day was coming on, or if the night was falling. He stood with Warmaster Ryse and his posse of command staff on the viewing platforms of the Fidelitas Vector and remembered how he’d left Cadia over twenty years before.

  In those twenty years, he’d had more than his fair share of benighted ice-worlds, void-moons and jungle worlds with blood-sucking nanobes that dropped onto you from the branches above.

  He’d seen the worst of the galaxy and now, looking down upon Cadia, he remembered his last moments on his home world.

  A young Whiteshield, without a kill to his name.

  Bendikt’s father had never got the chance to go off-planet. He was one of the one in ten Cadian Shock Troopers whose draft drew them as a territorial guard. It was his life to stay at home and stand ready to protect Cadia. But war had not come, and that uneventful career was a shame that had discoloured his life.

  When the sixteen-year-old Isaia Bendikt drew an off-world draft he was both proud and envious of his son. It was a hard thing for a dour father to express, so he’d done what many fathers had before him – bought a bottle of Arcady Pride and got both himself and Bendikt drunk.

  Bendikt remembered the night clearly. They had been sitting at the round camp table that stood in the middle of the small sub-hab central room of their home. His father had drawn up the camp chairs and slammed the bottle down between them, set two shot glasses on the table.

  He had forced a smile as he unscrewed the top, crumpled it up in his hand and threw it back over his shoulder, where it had rattled in the corner of the room. His mother had left them a few plates of boiled grox-slab and cabbage on the table. Bendikt had tried to line his stomach as his father poured them a shot glass each.

  ‘Here,’ he’d said and held out the brimming glass.

  They’d tapped the rims against each other and tipped the glasses high. Shot by shot they’d drunk and slowly knocked the bottle back. When the muster bell rang there was only a little amasec in the bottom of the bottle. ‘To your first kill!’ his father had slurred. His mother, a thin, worn, earnest-looking woman, had joined in with the last toast.

  It was a short walk to the muster point, where other Whiteshields were being loaded onto rail trucks, their apprehensive faces staring out from under their Cadian-pattern helmets. All the tracks led straight to the landing fields outside Kasr Tyrok.

  Bendikt and his parents pushed through the crowds to find his truck. Both his mother and his father had last words for him, though he was damned if he could remember them. He was only sixteen and so drunk he could barely stand. There were no tears. It was poor form to show sadness when a Cadian was sent to fight. It was part of the rhythm of life: birth, training, conscription, death. It was natural that a young Whiteshield would go and kill the enemies of the Imperium.

  Bendikt had imagined himself many times taking the straight route south, and never seeing his home again. Before climbing aboard, he checked himself one more time to make sure that in his drunken state he had not forgotten anything.

  He had boots, webbing, jacket, belt, combat knife, lasrifle, three battery packs, Imperial Primer in his left breast pocket, water canteen in his right. He pulled in a deep breath. He was ready, he told himself, to face anything the galaxy could throw at him.

  ‘So,’ Bendikt said. They said goodbye to one another, and his mother briefly embraced him and stuffed a packet of folded brown paper into his jacket pocket. ‘Grox-jerky,’ she whispered.

  She was a tough woman, brought up on a planet where the only trade was war, and little given to expressions of emotion.

  ‘I want to thank both of you for giving me life. I promise you I will be all that a Cadian should,’ he said. It was a speech he had prepared, but being drunk he stumbled on his words and left much of it out.

  Then he saluted and turned to climb aboard the truck. He looked out to wave goodbye to his parents, but darkness was falling and they had already turned for home. That was the last Bendikt had ever seen or heard of his family. For the next twenty years, other Guardsmen had been his brothers and sisters, and the Emperor his father.

  Bendikt found it hard to remember his father’s face but had never forgotten the hug his father had given him, and feeling his father’s thick arms wrap around him, his broad, rough hands on his back. His mother’s voice had never left him; he could recall her whispering ‘grox-jerky’ into his ear, and those words stayed with him, and somehow came to mean ‘Look after yourself’, and even ‘You are well-loved, my son.’

  As Cadia revolved beneath them Warmaster Ryse put both hands to the carefully tooled brass railings and leaned forward, his breath misting a little on the chill of the foot-thick glass.

  He wanted to mark this moment with something momentous, yet poetic and memorable. Something that could go in his memoirs when, and if, retirement came. As if sensing its moment, the Warmaster’s servitor-scribe, an emaciated body with augmetic stylus right arm and waist-mounted scroll, shuffled forward, knocking a few other sycophants out of the way.

  The scribe had come with the title of Warmaster and Ryse seemed to rather like having his every word taken down for posterity. And now that there was no more Deucalion Crusade for Ryse to lead, it had occurred to many of them that perhaps Ryse might not be a Warmaster much longer.

  Perhaps, many were thinking, Ryse’s star was on the wane, and it was time for them to find one that was rising.

  Ryse coughed to clear his throat, then his bass-baritone rang out, ‘We have returned to our mother in her time of direst need.’

  There was more, and Bendikt thought the Warmaster’s speech could have been better, but the Warmaster finished with a flourish, like an Imperial preacher waxing lyrical. ‘Men shall not say that we forgot our duty, nor that we forgot from whence we came.’

  As he spoke, there was the scratch of stylus on vellum, leaving a trail of precise minuscule, in neatly justified blocks of text. Bendikt could not help reading over the scribe’s shoulder while Ryse paused as if waiting for it to catch up, letting the words ring through his head.

  Bendikt looked away. The Warmaster turned, and as if picking him out for not paying due attention, asked, ‘What do you think, Major Bendikt?’

  ‘She looks peaceful enough to me,’ Bendikt stammered.

  Ryse smiled indulgently. ‘Yes. Cadia sent out the call and we have returned. Her need has not been forgotten.’ The motors of the Warmaster’s bionic arm whined gently as he patted Bendikt on the back. No doubt he had meant this to be a human gesture, but Bendikt did not find the crude press of metal fingers comforting.

  ‘How long until we disembark?’ Ryse asked a thin, pale officer with a shock of white hair.

  The officer snapped his heels together. ‘Governor Porelska has sent his personal barge to bring you down, Warmaster. Sacramentum is being loaded onto it as we speak. As soon as it is stowed down, I will let you know, sir. The freight captain did not think it would be more than a few hours.’

  Sacramentum was Ryse’s Leviathan. A brass-worked marvel of gunnery and armour and engineering that had spearheaded at least two assaults on the hive world of Owwen.

  ‘Good,’ Ryse said. ‘Good.’ He was one of those men who liked to fill silences with his own voice. At that moment one of the adjutants touched the Warmaster’s sleeve. The commander of a battalion of Mordians had arrived on the viewing deck. They were standing by the lift in a formal and uninviting group, waiting for an introduct
ion.

  ‘Ah!’ Ryse said as if a passing chat with the Mordians was all he wanted in the world, and nodded to them all. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen.’

  As Ryse’s entourage fell away only one other man remained, staring down at Cadia.

  Bendikt took him in through the corner of his eye. He was a first-degree general from his epaulette, but he wore combat drab, not dress uniform, and had both hands placed firmly on the brass railing, his fists clenching it so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.

  His boots had not been polished since embarkation. There were mud splatters on the hem of his coat and dried mud stains on his knees as well. That was a detail worthy of note: generals didn’t often kneel, never mind in mud.

  Bendikt couldn’t hold himself back. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he ventured. ‘Are you General Creed?’

  The man turned to him. He was broad and bull-necked, with close-shaven hair. His eyes were hard and intense. Bendikt coloured. ‘Sorry. I mean, are you the General Creed?’

  ‘Well, there are four generals named Creed last I counted.’ The other man’s eyes had a mischievous twinkle.

  ‘General Ursarkar Creed?’

  ‘Yes. I am one of two whose name is Ursarkar Creed. The other, a fine old man of three hundred and twenty years, has retired to the training world of Katak. I spent six months with him there, working with Catachans. Good bunch. General Ursarkar Creed had a particularly good stock of amasec, though I didn’t think much of his stubs. They were a little too refined for me. I like something with a little more punch.’

  Creed’s mouth almost smiled. ‘As he came first, he has the honour of being plain General Ursarkar Creed. Because I am the second, I am known as Ursarkar E. Creed.’ He put out a hand and Bendikt returned the hard grip.

  ‘I am honoured to meet you,’ Bendikt said.

  Creed seemed amused by the word. ‘Honoured?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bendikt said. ‘We were in the same draft.’

  ‘Were we now?’

  ‘Yes. I always thought that my career had gone well until I heard you had made general. The first of our draft.’

  To make general by the age of forty years, Terran standard, was a feat almost unheard of.