Millennium Of War by Various authors

Author:Various authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-01T15:03:01+00:00

PRUDENTIA

Andrew Ottley

Through the Storm

It was hard to hold the pistol steady at the man’s temple, but First Sergeant Andillo Behno fought the judder and scrap of the bucking pinnace to hold his barrel of his autopistol steady. He had been praying constantly for the last thirty seven minutes that he would not have to fire the pistol. He didn’t want to kill this innocent man but if he had to he would. That was a part of his duty; if it meant saving human lives, killing other people, even innocent people.

The innocent man under his gun kept mewing like a deranged old cat. Occasionally, the man's teeth would click hard against each other and momentarily a second voice would emanate from the man’s mouth. The first time the strange guttural sound came, Andillo's trigger finger tightened. His finger was a micron away from painting the hull of the pinnace with the sanctioned psyker’s brain. From the depths of his guts he felt the urge again. It was pathetic of him to feel it at all, but there was something in him that desperately didn’t want to kill this fellow servant of the Throne. But he would; he would do his duty. He would not give the enemy a chance to hurt his men.

Around Andillo inside the assembly deck of the Imperial Navy pinnace, thirty other sanctioned psykers of the Ordo Hereticus were similarly held at gunpoint. Unlike the men around them who stood desperately holding the overhead tangle of handholds, the psykers hung directly from the roof. Leather belts attached at their shoulders and elbows held them to the roof and held their arms outstretched in an unnervingly saintly, yet masochistic cruciform way. Each of the thirty psykers was guarded by three men of the Swanbourne Sabres. The troops' armour and battle dress uniforms deep blue and tan camouflage were marked with a scarlet red shoulder braid ending in the Inquisitorial rosette. The rosette marked their secondment to the Ordos. A secondment which had started as a rushed necessity, but had then continued for six hundred years after the Sabres had proved themselves to be most invaluable to the needs of the Holy Inquisition all over the Segmentum Pacificus.

The whining protestations of the pinnace’s engines increased again and it seemed impossible to Andillo that the ship’s engines could have any more power to give to fight the turmoil outside the ship. The maelstrom outside the ship was the reason why each of the psykers was at gunpoint of three of the most elite Astra Militarum soldiers in the segmentum. The choir of psykers was pushing desperately against one of the most severe, most concentrated warp storms the Imperium had witnessed in millennia. Steering any vessel into a storm this concentrated, let alone a ship as small as an interplanetary pinnace, was a suicidal maneuver akin to steering a rowboat into a hurricane with the hope of making it to the safety of the eye. The tiny patch of safety the pinnice was aiming for was the once beautiful world of Prudentia.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.