by Various
Jah-Hlley, a grenade in either hand, rose up in front of the second half-track before the driver of the vehicle had even registered his presence. A frag grenade bounced into the open compartment, even as a krak grenade rolled between the vehicle’s treads. The two explosions were nearly simultaneous. Jah-Hlley pivoted, raising his bolter. He fired methodically, targeting the gunners on the back of the lead vehicle. The latter exploded a moment later, pelting Jah-Hlley with flaming debris. He clucked disparagingly over the vox-channel.
‘Oh what now?’ someone complained, their exasperation obvious despite the crackle of static that marred the channel. Harper, Jah-Hlley thought, of course.
‘You blew up the lead track, Harper. You were supposed to take out the last one,’ Jah-Hlley said as he stepped around the burning hulk of the second vehicle.
The gunners on the remaining half-track had realised their predicament. They opened up with more enthusiasm than accuracy, swinging the stubbers around to blaze away at the Space Marine. Bullets caromed off of his power-armour, and he idly recorded the data. If his armour was penetrated, it was best to record at what velocity and range the penetration occurred, in order to aid the Chapter’s armourers in seeing that it didn’t happen again.
‘First, last, what’s the difference? The only good enemy is a dead enemy,’ Harper growled.
Jah-Hlley made a note to suggest that Harper’s caff-ration be docked. The man was anxious and irritable, both of which could get him, or one of his companions, killed. Neither was acceptable. The dead couldn’t learn.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t the plan,’ another voice chimed in. ‘Now you’ve dumped one of the Emperor’s Own right in it, you idiot!’ That was Arta, Harper’s superior in this resistance cell. There were a dozen such cells active in Khost at the moment, thanks to the brutal pogroms initiated by the renegades. The battle-brothers of his own cadre were scattered about the embattled hive, advising and assisting other such groups.
That was the Mentors’ method of operation. Though Space Marines were the greatest warriors of the Imperium, they were finite and could not be everywhere at once. Other Chapters threw themselves into war on behalf of the citizens of the Imperium, but the Mentors served by ensuring that the citizens could fight their own battles. Chapter Master Nisk Ran-Thawll had a saying – ‘One war, one cadre’.
Arta and her rag-tag group were not as efficient as Mentors, but they fought hard nonetheless, adapting to his suggested stratagems with an enthusiasm he found infectious. They were brave, but fragile. Yet that fragility lent them cunning. Jah-Hlley found them fascinating and endlessly inventive – indeed, they had taught him much. Each war was its own classroom, with its own unique lessons. Even so, he found it hard not to simply take command of the group, for their own protection. But they were not children to be coddled. While he was assigned to them, they were brothers-in-arms. More than that – they were cadre, his cadre, to teach and be taught by.
‘He’s fine! Look at him,’ Harper protested. ‘He’s like a small tank!’
Granted, some of them are harder to think of that way than others, Jah-Hlley noted. ‘Commendations and condemnations can wait, I feel. Now is an opportune moment to apply adaptive stratagems,’ he interjected. ‘I suggest flanking manoeuvre zeta-six.’
‘Right, you heard him,’ Arta barked over the frequency. ‘Up and at ’em, boys and girls!’ Men and women rose up out of the ruins to either side of the road and began firing at the renegades. They were displaying a remarkable restraint, Jah-Hlley noted, with some pride. They were learning. The pride was replaced with chagrin as half a dozen of the resistance fighters charged towards the remaining vehicle, whooping and shouting. Harper was in the lead.
The renegades were terrible shots, but quite effective at close range. They leapt from the half-track and went to meet their attackers with ululations of their own. They were outnumbered, but that did not deter them. Jah-Hlley grunted in annoyance and waded into the struggle in order to prevent Harper’s idiocy from getting any of the others killed. He doled out quick, efficient trip-hammer blows with his fists, palms and fingers, popping nerve clusters and rupturing organs. Unaltered humans had over one hundred vulnerable points, and a Mentor had memorised where each was before they graduated from aspirant to brother, for those occasions when the use of a chainsword or combat knife was inadvisable.
As he drove his palm through the breastbone of a knife-wielding renegade, Jah-Hlley saw Harper fall onto his rear. A renegade raised a bayonet-tipped lasgun over Harper for a downwards thrust. He reached the two even as the bayonet descended, and he grabbed the stock of the weapon. He yanked it from its owner’s hands and hurled it aside.
‘I said manoeuvre zeta-six, not gamma-eight, Harper,’ Jah-Hlley said as he grabbed the back of the renegade’s neck and stabbed his stiffened fingers through the rear of the man’s skull with a nasty sound. ‘If you die, you will never learn.’ Jah-Hlley jerked his hand free and the man flopped to the ground, limbs jerking in his death-throes.
Harper goggled up at the Space Marine.
‘You – you saved me,’ he said.
Jah-Hlley held out his hand. ‘You are cadre. And next time, you will save yourself.’
Caleb dreamed, and his dreams were dark.
The night was lit by explosions, by the glare of both sides’ flares. Shells screamed from the sky. Artillery belched smoke and noise. Muck and shrapnel pattered across the wire-torn hell of no-man’s-land. Caleb tried to move, but his arms and legs were snared in razorwire. Grime masked the colour of his fatigues and, though he strained to make out the insignia on his shoulder, it blurred even as he stared at it. A thumping head announced a concussion and he groaned, calling out to the men that ran by. They were unhurried, kitted out in ghostly grey fatigues, and floated from corpse to corpse like harvesters of the dead men’s souls. It would be a rich harvest indeed when the trench line buckled. Perhaps it already had.
This was a dream, and Caleb knew that he dreamed.
The figures paid him no mind and for that he was grateful. There was something fearful about these men, the way they walked through the hail of grit with such detachment. The largest amongst them saw him stir, then paused in his ministrations and came for him. In pearl-white armour, he strode through the fog of the dream. Caleb tried to slither free of the wire tangle, but couldn’t move his legs. His hands ran through the muck in search of his lasgun, but it wasn’t there. Of course, he thought, heart pounding.
This was a dream, and Caleb’s dreams were always dark.
Too soon, the colossus of a man was standing over him, examining Caleb’s body with a ghoulish interest. He leant in, fingers as hard as bone unpeeling the grime that caked Caleb’s collar to exhume his dog tags.
‘Lieutenant Caleb, are you with me?’
The voice had a calm authority that Caleb yearned to surrender to. Perhaps it was just a hangover from the dream, but he could not lie still, not yet.
‘I can’t feel my legs,’ Caleb whispered, throat dry and speech painful.
‘Never mind them,’ the voice soothed.
Caleb blinked, eyes misty. He was lying down, and it sounded like it was raining. The air was dry though, the signature warmth of electrical heaters, and he could hear voices all around. The odour of powerful counterseptics overpowered even the stench of his fatigues.
‘My men,’ said Caleb, recovering a measure of urgency along with the fragments of his memory. He’d been leading a company across no-man’s-land, a last desperate push for the enemy trench across a minefield that hadn’t been on the briefing charts. ‘Holy Terra, my legs.’
‘Never mind them,’ the voice repeated. ‘Drink something.’
A plastek cup appeared at his lips, a force he could not resist tilting back his head until he was helpless but to drink. It smelled like recyc, but it tasted like springwater. He drank a little more before the cup was pulled away and strong, hard hands shaped him into a sitting position. Caleb swallowed a surge of giddiness and bl
inked to clear the fog that lingered around his eyes.
He was on a bed in what looked like an emergency shelter. Lumen strips dangled and swayed from the corrugated roofing. The prefab rockrete walls were pasted with hygiene edicts and lined with locked cabinets that rattled with distant explosions. Orderlies in blue-grey scrubs walked between the trolley-beds. Upon them lay men in the universal fatigues of blood and grime. They moaned, cried out, wept, and whispered to the figments of a narthecium sleep. Caleb recognized none of them, but theirs were the cries of the dying from his dream. And the patter of muck and shrapnel over no-man’s-land, the sound that he had just mistaken for rain, hardened into the downpour of small arms rounds upon an iron roof. Every thirty seconds or so, something more substantive detonated nearby, causing everything in the shelter to shake, the wheels of Caleb’s trolley-bed skitting from side to side.
The giant gripped the side rail of his bed, holding it effortlessly steady. For the first time, Caleb got a proper look. At once, his heart swelled as if to choke him and he tried to rise, but couldn’t. It wasn’t just his legs failing him this time. It was his arms, his neck, even his chest felt feeble. He couldn’t breathe. He should be standing to attention, or prostrate upon the ground, not lying upon his bed to be tended by one of the godly Adeptus Astartes.
‘Peace, lieutenant,’ said the Space Marine, his pale helm projecting a soothing timbre. ‘In death is the Emperor’s love equally shared.’
‘Do you… Do you mean… Am I…?’
‘You are in pain, brother. Please, drink some more.’ The Space Marine inserted the cup between Caleb’s lips. Helpless as an infant in a god-warrior’s arms, Caleb complied and drank. When he had accepted what the Space Marine deemed sufficient, the warrior again stood back.
Across a widening gulf of confusion, Caleb tried to pin down anything familiar from the Space Marine’s wargear. His power armour was as smooth as ivory and bedecked with purity seals and devotional scrolls. The shoulder pad bore a heraldry that Caleb did not recognise. It was a red cross, but with each arm split down the middle, more like four arrowheads targeting the centre.
‘Where am I?’ Caleb managed. ‘There were Space Marines battling in my sector, but they were pulled out. I’ve not seen your Chapter before. I don’t–’ He clutched his temple as a stabbing pain shot through it. He felt sick. Almost immediately afterwards, his arm went slack and his head flopped back to the hard pillow. His thoughts were muddy. ‘I… I don’t recall.’
‘I am Raphel, of the Hospitallers. It is my sworn honour to tend the Emperor’s fallen.’
Caleb tried to mumble something, but couldn’t. His lips were numb and it was spreading. Deep in his mind there was a fear that demanded to be heard but it found no outlet in him. The sounds from outside had intensified. It sounded like hand-to-hand fighting, but Caleb was aware of it in the dim way of a drowsy child from beneath his bedclothes.
Calmly, the orderlies moved between the wounded. One by one, they powered down life support generators and withdrew IV lines. A low hum that Caleb hadn’t even registered faded back until all that was left was the muted rumble of war. The murmurs of the dying fell quiet. There were no more tears.
‘Defend the Emperor’s pilgrims to the last,’ intoned the Hospitaller as the orderlies set aside the trappings of the medicae for the tools of war. One man was handing out lasguns and another power packs. The men slammed the cells into their weapons, dialled the charge to maximum and flicked from full-auto to single-shot as they fanned out through the shelter. Each man took a bed.
Caleb’s shout forced a dribble of air between his slack lips. The orderlies took aim at the wounded men and fired, a burning head-shot between the eyes. Caleb gave a moan, experiencing a perversely anaesthetic dread as the Hospitaller drifted from his bedside, drew a bolt pistol, and deposited a plastek cup upon the tray table by his headrest. The remaining liquid had charred the clear sides a smoky grey.
‘Dream the Emperor’s dream, brother. No man of the Imperium need fall by the heretic’s hand. Not where there is a Hospitaller to honour his final duty.’
He had thought surrender the better choice. He had hoped to avoid wrath and perhaps, just perhaps, inspire mercy. If not for his people, then at least for himself.
He watched as another of his ministers was brought before the horned monster. The judge in power armour grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him from the ground. ‘Do you have value? You do not have perfection, but can you conceive of that state?’
The minister’s feet danced for purchase in the air. ‘No, lord,’ he gasped. ‘Next to you, what could–’
The judge, who was called Mindarus, interrupted by bringing up his other hand and punching through the man’s skull. ‘Disappointing,’ he said. ‘His underlings are obviously no better, if they have left him in such ignorance. Kill them all.’
At the back of the Hall of Justice, one of the other monsters nodded and left on his mission of extermination.
Lord Nathaniel Bellasun, Imperial Commander of Sendennis, was not a warrior. He would admit to being a coward, but he preferred to think of himself as a realist. He knew his nature, and that of his world, and what both their capacities were. Sendennis delivered its requisite tithes to the Imperial Guard, but its troops were not prized on the field of battle. They were soft from the primary industry of Sendennis: luxury. For the nobles and rogue traders with means and appetites, Sendennis accepted the one and provided for the other. It had done so for centuries. Excess was its indigenous art form. Its isolation in the Eastern Fringe, at the limits of the Imperium’s influence, gave Sendennis considerable license.
But now the monsters had come, and they confronted Bellasun, who fancied himself an epicure of some knowledge, with the perfection of excess. They called themselves the Flawless Host. Their armour was the black of night, the violet of deep luxury, and, most disturbing of all, a pale pink that recalled both the infants of the privileged and the exposed muscle of the mutilated. They had demanded the capitulation of Sendennis. Bellasun had faith in the Emperor, but felt that His protection was too remote. He had opened all doors to the monsters, and now flawless horror was ravaging Sendennis.
Mindarus gestured, and Bellasun walked towards him. His mind raced. To survive, he must offer something sublime. He let his imagination run riot with atrocities. It was with even a bit of pride that he began to speak before he had even reached the judge of his fate. ‘My lord,’ he began, and bowed low. ‘If I may, I can propose the most exquisite of martyrdoms.’
The rear of the hall exploded. The doors flew into splinters, and a large chunk of the wall disintegrated. The Chaos Space Marine who had left a moment before was sent arcing through the air, his limbs severed, his head dangling from his torso. A squad of giants charged in, so close on the heels of the explosion it was as if their mere presence had shattered the wall. They were clad in ancient grey power armour, studded and already splashed with the blood of their foes. Their pauldrons were emblazoned with a coiled shark. They moved down the central aisle of the hall, heading directly for Mindarus.
Bellasun felt the world give way beneath him. He had been on the verge, he thought, of coming to an understanding with the invaders. They embodied the principles of Sendennis taken to the final degree, so surely there was room for an understanding. But now terrifying myths had arrived. Bellasun did not know the name of these warriors. He knew of them only through the tales of their actions, tales that the people of Sendennis told each other to exorcise the fear that these unforgiving beings might be real. They were predators in the night of the void. They were the coldness of the universe that Bellasun’s world existed to deny. And now the feral truth had arrived.
The Flawless Host, scattered around the hall, opened fire. The thousands of prisoners panicked. They stampeded, and took many of the shells intended for the loyalist Space Marines. Soft mortals exploded. Blood was rain and spray and mist, and it filled the air. The loyalists answered the traitors in kind. They aimed hi
gher. Civilians who stayed low were unharmed. But others, beyond reason, tried to escape the crush by climbing over the marble benches. Some of them fell back, their bodies shredded, coating their fellow prisoners with vitae.
The loyalists’ fire was limited, intended to do no more than hamper and enrage. It worked. As the squad closed with the traitor captain, the rest of the Flawless Host rushed forward.
Bellasun dropped to the ground. He scrabbled to the nearest pew and tried to tuck himself underneath. He had grown too wide, and so curled against the stone, whimpering as the two forces came together around him.
He had believed himself a connoisseur of sensation. He had been a fool. Before him now was sensation in absolute form. The Flawless Host fought with perverse grace. They revelled in each telling blow. The loyalists killed with brutal frenzy. They smashed their foes to the ground with power fists and gutted them with chainswords. There was no art to their war, only a carnivore’s savaging of prey. There was very little left of each traitor that fell. The floor of the hall was awash with death.
The monsters of excess tore each other apart. The hunger for perfection wrestled with the hunger for the kill. The greater rage of the grey predators triumphed. They reduced the traitors to ruined armour and shards of bone. When the last of the chain-blade growls faded, the air was humid with slaughter.
The terrified citizens quieted, awaiting the new determination of their fate.
