by Nick Kyme
Squad Demetrian stood a short distance from the lord general’s Baneblade, honouring their wargear through daily prayer and muttered rituals. There they remained, ignoring the Guard all around, until thrusters shrieked in the sky above.
‘What in the name of hell is that doing here?’ Lord General Ulviran asked Major Dace as they looked up at the dark shape coming in to land with a howl of engines. The two officers left the cooling shadows of the command tank and approached the Astartes. Behind the warriors, throwing up a blizzard of dust, their Thunderhawk kissed the rubble-strewn ground and settled on its clawed stanchion feet.
‘Are you leaving?’ Ulviran demanded of Argo, aghast as he shouted above the cycling-down engines.
‘No.’
‘Then what—’
‘Move aside, lord general,’ the Chaplain said. ‘We need room for our equipment. And if you would be so kind as to move your Baneblade, it would be appreciated.’
Dace, a short and rotund example of Radimir manhood, drew himself up to his unimpressive full height. ‘We move out within the hour! You can’t do… whatever it is you’re doing.’
‘Yes,’ Argo said, ‘I can.’ His skullish helm glared down at the fat man. ‘And if you try to stop me, I will kill you.’ To his credit, Dace did a fine job at appearing unmoved by the vox-growled threat.
‘We have orders from Segmentum Command, and the Crimson Fists must abide by them.’
‘That’s an amusing fiction,’ Argo smiled, knowing the humans couldn’t see his expression. ‘Feel free to entertain that fantasy as you get out of our way.’
Ulviran looked stricken, like he’d just taken a gut wound. He watched in mute sickness as servitors and robed serfs unloaded portable industrial equipment down the Thunderhawk’s ramp.
‘If you do not move aside,’ Argo said with false patience in his voice, ‘the Thunderhawk lander coming from orbit with more equipment will be forced to destroy your Baneblade to make room to land.’
‘Equipment?’ Dace was indignant. ‘For what?’
It was Ulviran who answered. He’d seen the drills and clawed scoops on the machinery being unloaded.
‘Digging…’ The lord general’s face was wrinkled in thought.
Argo favoured the officers with a bow. ‘Yes. Digging. Now move aside, if you please.’
Defeated and confused, the two men backed away. Dace was red-faced and scowling, Ulviran subdued and voxing orders to make room for further Astartes landings.
When the Guard left just under an hour later, three Thunderhawks were nested in the ruins of the Cantorial Palace, each one freed of its cargo of servitors, serfs and machinery.
‘They’re heading west,’ Imrich nodded towards the rolling Guard column.
‘Then they’ll die well,’ the Chaplain snapped, and his hand cut through the air in a gesture to the work crews.
Drills ground into stone, scoops clawed piles of rubble aside, and the slaves of the Crimson Fists Chapter began to dig.
IT TOOK THREE days to make the first discovery.
By this time, the Guard was nearing the edge of Southspire, mere hours from their final encounter with the greenskin warlord. The Fists remained at the Cantorial Palace, silently admiring the Revenants’ decision to die on the offensive, rather than retreat and die in their makeshift fort-camp.
Three days had passed since the Guard rolled out.
Three days of random sieges and petty assaults punctuating the sunlit hours and the long nights. Although the orks had been crushed in the area, wandering bands of savages still attacked the Crimson Fists’ position. Each of the attempts made by the snorting, roaring mobs were met with torrents of heavy bolter fire from the grounded Thunderhawks and the seasoned killing prowess of Squad Demetrian as they maintained a perimeter vigil day and night, never resting, never sleeping.
On the evening of the third day, as the dull sun fell below the horizon, one of the serfs cried out. He’d found something, and the Astartes came running.
THE FIRST BOY was dead.
His scout’s armour was largely intact, as was his body. Vayne was the one to lift the corpse from its rubble grave, treating it with all due honour as he laid it out on the ground by the first Thunderhawk. Argo came over once the examinations were complete to intone the Rite of Blessed Release. He knelt by the body, pressing his slit palm to the slain boy’s forehead and leaving a smear of blood that mixed with the dirt on the child’s dusty face.
‘Novice Frael,’ Vayne consulted his narthecium, tapping at the keypad as he examined the readout. ‘Age thirteen, initial stages of implantation.’
‘There’s very little decay,’ Argo observed in a soft voice.
‘No. Blood and tissue samples indicate he died three or four days ago. My guess would be the day before we arrived.’
‘Four months,’ Argo whispered, looking back over the rubble. ‘He was under there for four months, and we were three days too late. That…’
‘What?’ Vayne closed his narthecium and reset the data display. Surgical cutting tools snicked back into his bracer. ‘That isn’t… fair,’ Argo finished. He knew how foolish the words sounded.
‘If he’d been fully human,’ Vayne said, ‘he’d have died in the first two weeks. Thirst. Starvation. Trauma. It was a miracle his initial implantations even allowed him to survive this long. Almost sixteen weeks, Argo. That’s worthy of the rolls of honour itself.
They’d avoided discussing the odds up until now. It was a mission none of the squad expected to fulfil with anything approaching glory.
‘Sixteen weeks.’ Argo closed his eyes, though his helm stared at Vayne, its gaze unbroken.
‘Even without the sus-an membrane,’ Vayne was tapping keys on his narthecium bracer, ‘our physiology will allow the slowing of the metabolism and the near-cessation of many bio-functions. It is still within the edge of prospective boundaries that an Astartes from the gene-seed of Rogal Dorn could survive the duration.’
Argo nodded. Full Astartes could survive, could potentially survive. That, however, wasn’t the true issue. The Chaplain looked over his shoulder, where the corpse of the young novice lay.
‘Kine,’ snapped the vox. ‘Kine at the south perimeter.’
Argo and Vayne were already running. ‘That’s penance for you, Imrich.’
‘Yes, Brother-Chaplain. I’ll do it right after we kill these whoreson aliens who’ve taken such umbrage at my trophies.’
THE SECOND BODY was discovered fifty metres away, two hours later. It was a dry husk, deep in waterless decay, and it took Vayne several minutes to identify the corpse as Novice Amadon, age fifteen, at the secondary stage of Astartes implantation. ‘He’s been dead for months,’ Vayne said, without needing to point out the crushed ribcage and severed right leg. Scraps of scout armour still clung to the dry fleshy remnants. ‘He was killed when the palace fell.’
The Chaplain was conducting the funerary rite on Novice Amadon when the first survivor was found.
‘Argo,’ the vox crackled live with Vayne’s excited voice. ‘Blood of the primarch, Argo, come over here now.’ Argo clenched his teeth. ‘A moment, please.’ He pressed his cut palm to the ruined corpse’s skull.
‘Argo, now!’
The Chaplain forced his twin hearts to slow in their beat as he suppressed his eagerness and finished the rite. Such things were a matter of tradition. Such things mattered, and the dead must be respected for their sacrifice. After what seemed an age, he rose to his feet and moved over to where Vayne and Demetrian were helping the survivor from the rubble.
His targeting reticule outlined the figure in a flash, indicating a failed lock-on. A runic symbol flashed onto his retinas. Geneseed failsafe. Target denied.
The figure was bone-thin, on shaking legs. Argo’s lens display conceded to a passive lock on the emaciated wraith, and at first all he saw was the digital displays of low-pulsing life signs under the figure’s name. He couldn’t believe anyone, even an Astartes, could be that weak and still li
ve.
The name registered at last, a moment before Vayne and Demetrian brought the figure close enough to recognise. Hollowcheeked, sunken-eyed and looking more dead than alive, the older Astartes grinned when he saw Argo. The Chaplain didn’t miss the resemblance between the survivor’s wasted face and his own skull helm.
‘Who have you found?’ Imrich voxed, sounding annoyed to be missing the discovery.
Argo tried to speak but couldn’t form the words. It was Vayne who answered.
‘Nochlitan. We found Scout-sergeant Nochlitan.’
The skeletal figure, the sergeant responsible for training both Argo and Vayne in the same squad, kept grinning as he took in the hulking form of Argo’s black battle armour.
‘Hello, my boy,’ Nochlitan said, and his voice was strong despite a scratchy edge and the veteran’s shivering limbs. ‘You took your damn time.’
‘We… We didn’t know…’
‘I can see why they made you a Chaplain with oratory like that.’ The sergeant paused to cough, a dry rasp of a sound that brought blood to his lips. ‘Now stop standing around slack-jawed and save the rest of my boys.’
THREE OF THEM had survived. Three of the ten.
It was enough to justify the mission – far more than enough. A single Fist novice would have justified the risk. For four months they had survived in the rubble, and they each emerged as wasted husks, life-signs barely flickering on Vayne’s narthecium. Nochlitan was the only one with the power of speech remaining to him. The two novices, in their ruined armour, were little more than tangles of withered limbs, barely breathing, drifting in and out of silent delirium.
The squad had been entombed since the Cantorial Palace had fallen. Nochlitan’s Scout squad were embattled in the undercroft as the explosives ticked towards detonation, and had been unable to escape the blast area.
Seven dead. Three alive. A small but blessed victory, torn from the jaws of catastrophe.
AS THE SERVITORS stored the digging equipment and the serfs readied the Thunderhawks for orbital flight, Argo sat with Nochlitan in the modest apothecarion. Vayne tended to the two novices, neither one older than sixteen.
‘Dorn’s holy hand,’ Nochlitan said, fixing the Chaplain with his grey eyes. ‘What happened to Vayne?’
‘A daemon.’
‘Is it dead?’
‘Of course it’s dead.’
‘Yes, of course. You see that one there?’ Nochlitan waved a weak hand in the direction of the stretcher next to him. ‘That’s Novice Zefaray.’
Zefaray wheezed into a rebreather mask that covered half of his face. Lines of angry tissue marked his temples and neck, where veins stood out like lightning streaks.
Argo watched the boy’s laboured breathing. Zefaray was the Scout squad’s Epistolary candidate, marked by the Chapter Librarium for the power of his psychic gift.
‘He will be greatly honoured by Chapter Master Kantor for this,’ the Chaplain said.
‘Damn right he will. Almost killed him, you know. Day and night, screaming into the warp and hoping one of the Librarium would hear. We were trapped close to one another. He would whisper and mutter, speaking of how he was riding a hundred minds to reach one we could trust so many systems away.’
Argo didn’t know what to say. It was a psychic feat of incredible strength. When one of the Chapter’s Epistolaries had reported the weak yet crazed contact, it had been all the incentive the Chapter’s highest echelons had needed. A recovery operation was mounted immediately.
‘Great things ahead for him,’ Nochlitan grinned. ‘Did you find my bolter, boy?’
They hadn’t. It showed on Argo’s face.
‘Ah, well.’ Nochlitan lay back on the stretcher, plugged into an array of tubes and wires. ‘I’ll miss that weapon, without a doubt. It was a fine gun. A fine gun. I killed a genestealer patriarch genus with that bolter. Tore its head clean off.’
‘We’ll be taking off in a few minutes. The Vigil waits in orbit. Once aboard, we make haste to Rynn’s World as soon as we break away from Syral.’
Nochlitan sat up again, trembling and overtaxing his remaining strength as his glare speared Argo’s eyes.
‘You told me the Radimir were still here. Still advancing on this new warlord. ‘
‘They are. They’ll engage the enemy’s main force this afternoon, if initial projections were correct.’
‘You’d abandon the Revenants? Boy, what’s wrong with you?’
‘Please don’t call me “boy”, sir. Chapter Master Kantor—’
‘Pedro Kantor, blessings upon my old friend, isn’t here, my boy. You are. And by Dorn’s holy hand, you want to face the Emperor one day knowing you ran from this fight?’
‘The odds are… beyond overwhelming. Everything we came to achieve would be void if we die in this battle.’ Nochlitan grasped at Argo’s bracer, clenching the smooth black ceramite in a thin-fingered claw that shook as if palsied.
‘You are the future of this Chapter.’ His grey eyes were the colour of summer storms. ‘You shape the path these novices will one day walk.’
Argo rose to his feet, letting his mentor’s hand slip from his arm, and left the room without a word.
THE THUNDERHAWK SCREAMED across the night sky, its downward thrusters kicking in as it hovered four hundred metres high. Its wing-mounted bolters aimed at the ground, barking in an unremitting stream. The servitors slaved to the weapons didn’t even need to aim. They couldn’t miss the horde below: a sea of green skin and chattering weapons, ringing a diminished cluster of grey.
The Revenants’ last stand.
The guns cut out after a minute, autoloaders cycling but not opening fire again. On the ground, the armoured divisions of the Radimir kept up their onslaught against the ork host in the city’s ruins, and Ulviran watched the Crimson Fist gunship as it stayed aloft, out of enemy fire range.
‘It’s the Fists,’ Dace said, and Ulviran smiled to himself at the man’s painfully obvious statement. Good old Dace. No better man to die with.
‘We did well, Dace. Almost reached that bastard warlord, eh?’
‘We did fine, sir.’ The major was still looking up at the sky, ignoring the war hammering around him.
‘So what are the Fists doing, exactly?’ the lord general asked. ‘My eyes aren’t what they once were.’
‘They’re…’
ARGO’S LENS DISPLAYS registered the altitude as he fell. The ground soared up fast in his red-tinted vision, and he clutched his sword and bolter tightly, blink-clicking the propulsion icon at the edge of his sight. The weighty jump pack on his back fired in a roaring kick, slowing his descent, but he still landed with jarring force ahead of the others.
He hit the ground running and his weapons sang. Left and right, he slashed his gladius into flesh and fired a relentless stream from his bolter, clearing a space around him in the thick of the churning orkish tide.
Toma was next, thudding to the ground and repeating Argo’s lethal sprint. Then Demetrian, then Vayne. Imrich was last, much to his gall. The others, whirling and killing, heard his curses as they started without him.
Twenty metres ahead of them through the ocean of writhing orkish flesh, unmistakeable in salvaged armour that swelled his form to the size of an Astartes Dreadnought, was the greenskin warlord.
Imrich landed and opened up his bolter, running for the brute.
‘He’s mine!’ he voxed to the others. ‘That skull is mine!’
In two gauntleted fists, one red, one black, the ancient weapon Traitor’s Bane was wreathed in coruscating waves of sparking force. The relic mace smashed aside three orks in a single swing, sending their broken forms to the ground still twitching with energy.
‘No.’ Argo stopped screaming the Litanies of Hate, drawing breath to reply to Imrich and the squad behind him. ‘The kine lord is mine.’
