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One Hate - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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ONE HATE

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

I am the future of my Chapter.

My masters and mentors often tell me this. They say I, and those like me, hold the Chapter’s soul in our hands. We wear the black, and we are the beating heart of a reborn brotherhood.

It is our duty to remember. We are charged to recall the traditions that came before the moment when our Chapter stood on the edge of extinction.

My name is Argo. In a Chapter with few remaining relics, I am blessed above my brothers in the tools of war in my possession.

My armour was born when the Imperium was born – repaired, amended and maintained in the centuries since by generations of warriors, slaves, servitors and serfs. My bolter roared on the battlefields of the Horus Heresy, and has been carried in the red-marked hands of thirty-seven Astartes since the day of its forging. Each of their names is etched into the dark iron of the weapon, along with the name of the world that claimed their lives. The eyes of my helm have stared out onto ten thousand wars, and seen a million of Mankind’s foes die.

Around my neck is a gift from the Ecclesiarchy of Holy Terra: an aquila symbol of priceless worth and imbued with the warding secrets of a technology almost lost to time. My armour is black, for I am death itself. My helm is the skull of every man that died in every battle fought by my Chapter in the ten millennia since our founding.

More than that, my face is the victorious leer of the dying Emperor.

And why am I charged with this responsibility? Why do I wear the black?

Because I hate. I hate more than my brothers, and my hatred runs blacker, deeper, purer than theirs.

One hate stands above all others. One hate that burns in our blood and barks from the mouths of five hundred bolters when we stand together in war. It is a hatred with many names: the greenskin, the ork, the kine.

To us, they are simply the Enemy.

We are the Crimson Fists, the shield-hand of Dorn, and we have survived extinction when all others would have fallen into worthless memory. Our hatred takes us across the stars in service to the Throne.

And now it brings us to Syral.

Syral. A lone orb around a diminutive sun, on the edge of Segmentum Tempestus.

The single celestial child of a red star that was taking thousands of years to die. The sun’s waning would take thousands of years before its eventual expiration, and the planet it warmed was still of great use to the Imperium.

Syral was an agri-world, with the globe’s landmasses given over to expansive and fertile continents of foodstuffs and livestock. Syral’s great oceans were similarly plundered by Imperial need. Beneath their dark surface, the tides concealed hydroponics facilities the size of cities, harvesting the edible wealth of the depths. As a planet, Syral had but one colossal purpose: to export a system’s worth of food ready for purchase by the worlds nearby that lacked such natural bounty. Syral fed three hive-worlds, from the spires of the rich to the slums of the destitute, as well as several Imperial Navy fleets and regiments of the Imperial Guard warring in nearby crusades.

From space, Syral was the blue-green of mankind’s ancestral memory, as if drawn from an artist’s imaginings of the impious ages of Old Terra. However, the face of a world can change a great deal in a year.

‘The Fists are back.’

Lord General Ulviran looked at Major Dace, who had spoken those words. With his thin face, ice-blue eyes and aquiline nose, the lord general was a natural when it came to bestowing withering looks on those among his staff that disappointed him. He gave one of those glances to Dace now. The major looked away, suitably chastised.

The gunship sat idle, as it had for several minutes now, its landing stanchions and velocity thrusters still hissing with occasional jets of steam as they released flight pressure and settled into repose. Across the side of this midnight-blue vulture of a vessel, an engraved symbol stared back at the horde of Guardsmen that waited. A clenched fist, as red and dark as good wine.

The gunship’s forward ramp lowered like a mouth opening. Ulviran was put in mind – as he always was when seeing an Astartes Thunderhawk – of a great steel bird of prey. When its forward ramp lowered, just beneath the cockpit window, the bird seemed to roar with the sound of whining hydraulics.

‘I count four,’ Major Dace said, making this his second most obvious observation that day. Four armoured forms, each more than a head taller than a normal man, tramped down the clanking ramp.

‘Just four…’ the major added a moment later. Ulviran would gladly have shot him, had he been able to think of a reason to do so. Not even a good reason, just a legal one. Dace was an asset on the battlefield, but at staff meetings his dullard observations were a tedium his fellow officers could easily do without.

The Astartes made no move to approach the crowd of Guardsmen. They stood as still as statues, monstrous bolters held to their eagle-emblazoned chests. Ulviran took stock of the situation. The Astartes were back, and it was not the time to stand around gawping. Control. The scene warranted control. Maybe there could be some dignity salvaged from this whole tawdry development. Having the Astartes arrive would be a cause for celebration right enough, but Ulviran recalled every single word in the missive he’d composed to Chapter Master Kantor of the Crimson Fists. Begging was the only word for it, really. He’d begged for aid, and here it was: deliverance once more. He was not a man who enjoyed resorting to begging. It had galled him even as he’d dictated the distress call.

Ulviran strode forward to meet the giants as they stood stone-still in the shadow of their avian gunship. He noted with unnoticeable displeasure that the heavy bolter turrets on the Thunderhawk’s wing tips panned across the camp, as if seeking threats even amongst Imperial forces. Did the Fists not even consider the Guard capable of holding their own base camp secure against the enemy? In that moment, deliverance or not, the lord general hated their damned arrogance.

‘Welcome back,’ he said to the first of the Astartes, who was undoubtedly the commander of this small team.

The warrior looked at the lord general, his snarling visored helm turning down to regard the human. This close, no more than an arm’s length from the towering warriors, Ulviran felt his gums ache from the pressuring hum of the squad’s power armour. The whine of energy was more tactile than audible, making his eyes water and prickling the skin on the back of his neck. He swallowed as the Astartes made the sign of the aquila, the warrior’s gauntleted hands forming the salute and banging against his armoured chest. Even the smallest of movements made their armour joints purr in a low mechanical snarl.

Ulviran returned the salute. His neck hurt a little, looking up like this, and he unwillingly flinched when the Astartes spoke.

‘With all due respect,’ the voice was a crackling, vox-distorted growl, far deeper than a normal man’s, ‘why are you addressing me?’

Ulviran hadn’t expected this level of disrespect, nor this degree of informality. He was a lord general, after all. Planets lived and died by his tactical expertise.

The general took in the details of the warrior’s armour. The suit was the blue of a starless midnight sky, trimmed in places with a bold red, nowhere more noticeable than the clenched fist on the warrior’s shoulder pad. A scroll detailing oaths and matters of unknowable honour was draped from the warrior’s other shoulder pad, moving slightly in the gentle wind. Hanging from a thick chain that had been made into a bandolier, oversized, misshapen skulls knocked quietly together as the Astartes moved. From the pronounced lower jaws and brutish bone structure, Ulviran knew they were the skulls of orks. In life, they’d been big orks, most likely leaders among their bestial kind. In death, they were impressive trophies.

This Astartes was clearly the leader of the squad. None of the others wore trophies to match.

‘I am addressing you because I assumed you were in command.’ He adopted the tone of one speaking to a small child, which his men would have found both laughable and insane had they heard. The thrill of authority over these giants rushed through the lord general’s blood. He would, after all, brook no disrespect.

‘Do I look like a brother-captain to you?’ the Astartes asked, and Ulviran wondered if the warrior’s vox-speakers made his voice into a growl, or if it was naturally that low.

Ulviran nodded in response to the question. He was determined not to be intimidated.

‘To my eyes, yes, you do.’

‘Well, I’m not.’ Here the Astartes looked to his fellows. ‘Not yet, anyway.’ Ulviran heard something at the edge of his hearing – a series of quiet clicks coming from the helms of the armoured men. He assumed, quite correctly, that they were laughing with each other over a private vox-channel.

The Astartes draped in skulls, chains and scrolls detailing his many victories inclined his head at one of the others.

‘He’s the sergeant.’

Ulviran turned to face this next one, making the sign of the aquila once more.

Before the lord general could speak, this next Astartes – who was clad in a blood-coloured toga draped around his armour – shook his helmed head.

‘No, lord general,’ the Astartes intoned, his voice as much a mechanical rumble as the first one’s had been. ‘You do not address me, either.’

Ulviran’s patience was reaching its end.

‘Then who am I to address?’

The robed warrior nodded in the direction of the Thunderhawk, at the newest arrival striding down the ramp. This Astartes was clad in plate of charcoal-black, and even without much knowledge of Astartes technology it was clear to Ulviran that the dark suit of power armour was an antique, dating back centuries – probably even millennia. The black warrior’s helmed face was a grinning skull, the red eye lenses lending it a daemonic cast as he looked left and right, surveying the landing site.

Ulviran swallowed, unaware of how his Adam’s apple bobbed and betrayed his nervousness. Throne, he thought. A Chaplain.

The Astartes in the red toga offered the lord general a slight bow.

‘You address him.’

In private, they discussed Syral. The Chaplain stalked around the large table with its map-covered surface. Here in the lord general’s command room, aboard his personal Baneblade, The Indomitable Will, the human and the Astartes shared words away from the ears of others.

‘We handed you this world four months ago.’

Those words chilled the lord general’s blood. They were an insult, certainly, but they were also an unarguable truth.

‘Circumstances change, Brother-Chaplain.’ And they had. Ork reinforcements had come in flooding waves, washing the western hemisphere in a tide of greenskin invaders. The Imperium’s easy victory, largely bought by the surgical strikes of the Crimson Fists four months before, was nothing more than a pleasant memory and a tale of what might have been. The Imperial Guard had been falling back ever since.

The Chaplain’s vox-voice was edged by growls, as if the man spoke at an octave almost too low for words.

‘You are losing Syral,’ the Astartes said. His skullish face stared at the human across the room.

‘I know better than to argue that assessment,’ came the lord general’s reply. ‘I’d wager that I see it clearer than you, for I’ve been watching it happen for months.’

Ulviran watched as the Chaplain reached up to his helm and pulled the release catches on his armoured collar. With a serpentine hiss of venting pressure, the locks disengaged and the Astartes removed his skulled helmet, reverently lifting it then laying it on the table before him. Its red eyes were dimmed now the helm was detached from the armour’s power supply, but they still glared at the lord general in dull accusation.

‘I am not here to chastise you, lord general.’

Ulviran smiled to hear the warrior’s true voice. It was deep and resonant, but with a gentility shaping the words. The Chaplain was, by the lord general’s best guess, close to thirty years of age, but with the Astartes it was almost impossible to tell. He didn’t even know for certain if they did age; he’d always taken the trope for granted that one determined a Space Marine’s age by the scars on their flesh and the inscriptions etched into their armour.

Had this Astartes been allowed to grow as a normal man, he might have been considered handsome. Even as the product of intensive genetic enhancement since puberty, the Chaplain was a fair example of his kind. The Astartes was almost two heads taller than a normal man, with features and body mass to match, but Ulviran saw something undeniably human within the warrior’s dark-blue eyes and the half-smile he wore.

The lord general liked him immediately. For Ulviran, who prided himself on being a fine reader of men, this was a rare development.

‘Brother-Chaplain–’

‘Argo,’ he interrupted. ‘My name is Argo.’

‘As you wish. I must ask you, Argo, how did you respond so quickly to our…’ he didn’t want to say to our plea, ‘…to our request for reinforcement?’

Argo met his gaze. The half-smile left his face, and the warrior’s eyes narrowed. The silence that followed the general’s question bordered on becoming awkward.

‘Just good fortune,’ the Chaplain said at last, the smile returning. ‘We were close to the system.’

‘I see. And are you alone?’

The Chaplain spread his hands in beneficence. One gauntlet was the same coal black as the warrior’s armour. The other, his left, was painted blood red in keeping with the traditions of his Chapter.

‘I bring with me the brothers of Squad Demetrian, of the Fifth Battle Company.’

‘Yourself and four others. Nothing more?’

‘The Chapter serfs and servitors responsible for the flight and maintenance of our Thunderhawk.’

‘No more Astartes.’ It was a statement of resignation, not a question.

‘As you say,’ the Chaplain offered a shallow but sincere bow, ‘no more Astartes.’

Ulviran was noticeably ill at ease. ‘As much as I thank the Throne and your Chapter Master for any assistance the Fists offer, especially so quickly, I had hoped for a… bolder show of support.’

‘Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. Four months ago, we broke the Enemy’s back here. I assume you recall the date.’

‘I do. The men still speak of it. They call it Vengeance Night.’

‘Very apt. We left the enemy reeling, lord general. We left them bloody, their armies shattered from our assaults across the globe. I was at the Siege of the Cantorial Palace. I was part of the strike force that destroyed the palace itself, and I was there when Brother Imrich of the Fifth took the head of Warlord Golgorrad in the battle amongst the smoking rubble. We are back, lord general, and I humbly suggest you be grateful for even the small blessing one squad of our Chapter represents.’

‘I am grateful, to you and your Chapter Master.’

‘Good. I apologise for any harshness in my tone. Now, let us talk of strategy.’ The Chaplain pointed with his red hand at the largest map spread across the table. ‘Southspire, the capital city, unless I am mistaken.’

‘You are not.’

‘And, according to the sensor sweeps made by my Thunderhawk as we broke orbit, the city – and the site of the Cantorial Palace at the city’s heart – is once more in the hands of the enemy.’

‘It is.’

Argo’s blue eyes met Ulviran’s, drilling into the officer with an unblinking lack of mercy.

‘So when do we take it back?’

The interior bay of the Thunderhawk echoed with Argo’s footfalls, his clanking tread ringing from the iron skin of the inert machinery stored there. Chapter serfs in robes of deep blue stepped aside, making the sign of the aquila as he passed. Argo nodded to each one in kind, whispering benedictions for them all. They thanked him and moved about the business of attending to the gunship’s innards and readying the stored machinery. Argo’s eyes raked along the heavy digging equipment stored in the hold, and his mood turned black.

Squad Demetrian was training. He heard them long before he saw them. Climbing a ladder to the next deck, Argo thumped the door release to the communal ‘quarters’, a room where Astartes remained strapped in flight seats when the gunship took to the skies. In the small usable space between the twin rows of seats, two of Squad Demetrian duelled in full armour.

The two warriors could not have been less alike. His armour draped in scrolls of his deeds, bone tokens of fallen foes, and the skulls of seven orks hanging from his chain bandolier, Imrich was a whirlwind of movement. Kicks, punches, elbow thrusts, headbutts – all thrown into a duel with shortswords, added between the moves of the clashing blades.

Opposing him was Toma, embodying pure economy of motion. Where Imrich’s fury twinned with his skill, Toma’s movements were calculated to the finest degree by a lightning mind that drove his vicious combat reflexes. His blade snapped into position to block and thrust in a silver blur, stopping precisely at each twist, never overbalancing, never overreaching, with Toma never giving ground.

‘I’ll wear you down, Deathwatch,’ Imrich teased. Their gladius blades locked again, and the two helms glared at each other only half a metre apart.

Toma said nothing. Displayed on the polished iron of his unique shoulder pad was the stylised symbol of the Holy Inquisition. He always fought in silence. His recent return from three years in the specialist Ordo Xenos Deathwatch Chapter hadn’t changed that.

The fight came to an end when Argo cleared his throat. Disengaging from one another, Imrich and Toma resheathed their blades.

‘I had you, Deathwatch.’ Imrich saluted his opponent with his clenched left fist against his heart.

‘Sure you did, hero.’ Toma’s voice was toneless as he returned the gesture.

‘I had you.’

‘The day you have me is the day the Emperor rises from the Throne and dances all night long.’

Brother-Sergeant Demetrian silenced them both with a fist pounded against the metal wall.

‘News, Brother-Chaplain?’ the sergeant asked.

Argo removed his helm and gave them his half-smile. ‘They think we’re here in answer of a distress call.’

The squad looked at the Chaplain, awaiting further explanation. Now this had their interest up.

‘You didn’t tell them the truth,’ said Demetrian. The veteran’s scarred face was a map of battles fought across a hundred systems. Both his gauntlets were crimson; he’d served time in the Crusade Company among the best of the best, and on the knee of his armour, a Black Templar cross was proudly displayed. The Declates Crusade, when the Templars and the Fists broke ranks to fight in mixed units, was a point of great honour for both Chapters. Demetrian had been there. A roll of his honours was recorded in acid-etched lettering on a gold tablet in the Chapter’s fortress-monastery back home on Rynn’s World.

Argo nodded. ‘I thought it best to retain the illusion of our compliance. The truth would breed animosity.’

‘No surprise,’ Demetrian’s words were as clipped and to the point as ever. ‘The plan remains the same?’

‘We fight until the Cantorial Palace. Then we do the duty entrusted to us. I saw the maps of Southspire and the enemy’s forces spread across the sector. A new warlord leads the enemy on the far side of the city, and the Guard ready for their last attempt at a big push. The city itself is flooded with roaming bands of foes.’

‘Numbers?’

‘Thousands within the city. Tens of thousands at the edge, where the warlord waits.’

‘I like those odds,’ Imrich said. They all heard the smile in his words, even from behind his helm.

Argo shook his head. ‘This is not a war we can win without the Guard.’

Now Toma spoke up. He sat in one of the restraining seats, meticulously dismantling and cleaning the sacred bolter given to him by the Ordo Xenos during his tenure in the Inquisitorial kill-teams.

‘Will the Guard win this war without us?’

Argo shrugged. ‘We have our orders.’

Toma pressed on. ‘And once we leave?’

‘The Emperor protects,’ the Chaplain replied.

Imrich’s skulls rattled as he turned. ‘So we flee a war that the Imperium is losing? I don’t like the thought of running from the kine.’

‘Duly noted, but Chapter Master Kantor was clear in his priorities,’ Argo said. ‘And you will do penance for your disrespect of the Enemy, Brother Imrich.’

It was a matter of small shame among some of the Crimson Fists that they referred to the greenskins as kine. On Rynn’s World, another agri-world, it was slang for ‘cattle’.

‘Yes, Brother-Chaplain,’ Imrich growled.

‘Hate the inhuman, slaughter the impure, and praise the Emperor above all. But always respect the foe.’

‘Yes, Brother-Chaplain.’ Imrich wanted to insist Argo stopped quoting the litanies at him. Instead he bowed his head. He knew better than to apologise.

‘When do we move out?’ Demetrian cut in.

‘Tomorrow night, the Guard will advance,’ Argo said, as he held his golden aquila medallion in his red-fingered gauntlet. ‘And we advance with them.’

Dawn found Argo in the cockpit of the Thunderhawk, still in his armour. He sat in one of the command thrones, his elbows on his knees, staring out of the window. He had not slept. He was Astartes. He barely needed sleep.

Toma came to him as he mused on the coming battle. The quiet warrior was a powerful credit to the squad, and Argo – who was over a century younger than the Deathwatch specialist – always welcomed his presence. He suspected it would not be long before the captain of the Fifth selected Toma for promotion into the Crusade Company, or to lead his own squad into the field of war.

‘Another dawn, Brother-Chaplain.’ Toma took the command throne next to Argo, sitting and holding his helm in his hands. The Deathwatch had aged him, Argo saw. New scars, faded from fast treatment but still noticeable, pitted the warrior’s cheek and temple.

‘Acid burns,’ Argo said, gesturing with a gloved hand, his black one. ‘The Deathwatch kept you busy.’

‘I can’t say,’ Toma replied. His face was as expressive as stone.

‘Can’t or won’t?’ Argo asked, already knowing the answer.

‘Both.’

‘The Ordo Xenos keeps its secrets close.’

‘It does.’ Toma’s expression was edged with thought as he replayed hazy recollections, little more than echoes, through his mind. Oaths had been sworn. Promises were made. Memories were torn from the mind by psyk-enhanced meditation and the ungentle scouring of arcane machinery.

It was the first time Argo had seen his fellow Fist’s neutral mask slip, and he found it fascinating.

‘We go to war today,’ the Chaplain said. ‘We are a poor portion of the Fifth’s strength, but we are the Fifth nevertheless. In the fires of war, we are forged. And yet I sense a burden on your soul, brother.’

Toma nodded. This was why he had come.

‘It’s Vayne.’

Brother-Apothecary Vayne was in the Thunderhawk’s confined apothecarion, little more than an operating table and racks of monitoring equipment fastened to the small room’s walls. Already prepared for the battle tonight, he was in full armour with one exception: his head was bare. The white-faced helm that marked him as an Apothecary rested on the surgery table, and this was the first thing Argo saw as he entered. The second thing was Vayne himself, adjusting data readouts on his arm-mounted narthecium. As Argo watched, several surgical spikes and knives snapped back into the bulky medical unit housed on Vayne’s forearm.

Vayne eventually turned to the sound of thrumming power armour, though his enhanced senses would have detected the Chaplain’s approach long before he came into the room.

‘Argo,’ he said in subdued greeting.

‘Vayne,’ the Chaplain nodded back.

The atmosphere between the two men was nothing short of ugly. Seven years before, they’d served together as novices in Nochlitan’s Scout squad. Seven years since the final trials to become Astartes, when Argo had been chosen to wear the black, and Vayne the white.

A Chaplain and an Apothecary drawn from the same scout unit. Sergeant Nochlitan, who like Demetrian had served admirably in the Crusade Company among the Chapter’s elite, had been honoured by Chapter Master Kantor himself for honing such excellence in a novice squad.

With the Chapter still in its perilous rebuilding stage, the finest warriors of the Crimson Fists were often charged with the duty of training novice squads. It was no shame to step away from the First Company to the role of Scout-sergeant, and Nochlitan was one of the most respected.

Beyond a few scars, Argo looked no different. The same could not be said for the Apothecary. Half of Vayne’s face was gone, replaced by cold, smooth steel shaped to resemble his features. Despite its artistry, the exquisite workmanship was clear evidence of a terrible wound that had almost been Vayne’s death. Vayne’s left eye, an augmetic lens of synthetic scarlet crystal, whirred in its circular socket as the Apothecary focused his gaze on the Chaplain.

‘You’re looking well,’ he remarked. Argo didn’t reply. He watched as Vayne limped around the surgical table, and considered the rest of the Apothecary’s newly-restored body.

Daemon-fire had done this to Vayne, during the Cleansing of Chiaro two months before. Fresh from the victory on Syral and the destruction of the Cantorial Palace, the Crimson Fists had entered the warp for several weeks to reach Chiaro, answering a call for aid by the planetary governor. Mutant cults were spreading in the rotting industrial sectors of his world. A true purge was needed to stamp the problem out, after the local defence forces had failed to quell the matter.

The Fists had not failed. It took a month and was not without casualties, but their duty was done. The rest of the strike force returned to Rynn’s World at the behest of Chapter Master Kantor. Argo and Squad Demetrian had returned to Syral aboard the support cruiser Vigil.

It had been a cold, quiet journey back to Syral. They were the only Astartes on board, except for a single Apothecary from the Fifth Company that remained to preside over Vayne’s injuries – and act in his stead if the younger man died.

Vayne had suffered as the servitors and his potential replacement rebuilt his body. He was almost certain to die, given the massive burns sustained and their initial refusal to heal. The Chapter would lose a gifted healer in a time when the Fists most desperately needed to reclaim and preserve their fighting strength. Had Vayne died, it would have been a true loss.

From shoulder to fingertips, his left arm was augmetic. It connected internally to the bionic sections of his spine and collarbone, purring in a smooth hiss of expensive augmentation that Argo’s keen hearing could detect even underneath the background hum of their power armour. As with his left arm, so too was his left leg bionic – from hip to toes. The augmentations were still new, still untested in battle, and although Argo doubted a normal human could discern the minute inconsistencies in Vayne’s gait and posture, to Astartes senses it registered as a subtle but noticeable hitch in his stride. A limp.

It was temporary, until the augmetics aligned with Vayne’s body patterns and wholly fused with his biorhythms. The leg ended in a splayed claw of a foot for enhanced stability: a cross of blackened metal that connected to the well-armoured ankle joint and the heavy musculature of the bionic shin and calf above.

‘Your attitude is beginning to create strain within your squad,’ Argo began. ‘I am told you are melancholic.’

Vayne scowled. His false eye hummed in its socket as it tried to conform to his facial expression.

‘Brother-Sergeant Demetrian has said nothing.’

‘You were saved because you have value to the Chapter. You stand in high regard for your skills. Why are you unbalanced by wounds which heal even as we speak?’

Vayne watched his own crimson left gauntlet close and open, repeating the motion several times. It was his bionic arm, and feeling was slow in returning.

‘I trained a lifetime in my own body. Now I fight in someone else’s.’

‘It is still your body.’

‘Not yet. There is acclimatisation to come.’

‘Then you will acclimatise. There is no more to say.’

‘You don’t see? This is not false pathos, Argo. I was perfect before, made in the Emperor’s image in accordance with his ancient and most sacred designs.’

‘You still are.’

‘No. I am a simulacrum.’ He clenched his augmetic hand into a numb fist. ‘I am the best imitation we are capable of creating. I am no longer perfect.’

‘Our brothers in the Iron Hands would dispute that diagnosis.’

Vayne scoffed. ‘Those uninspired slaves of the Mechanicum? They make war at the pace of toothless old men.’

‘If you resort to insults against our brother Chapters, I will lose my temper as well as my patience.’

‘My point is that I am no Iron Hand. And I have no wish to be some half-flesh imitation Astartes.’

‘You will acclimatise,’ Argo stepped forward, taking Vayne’s helm from the table and looking down at the white faceplate.

‘Even so, until then I am a liability to my brothers.’

Argo handed his friend the helmet and shook his head. ‘You are petulant beyond my comprehension. Only in death does duty end. We are the Fists. We are the shield-hand of Dorn. We do not weep and cower from battle because of pain or fear or worries of what might yet be. We fight and die because we were made to fight and die.’

Vayne took the helm and smiled without humour. Half of his face didn’t follow the expression.

‘What amuses you?’

‘You are blind, Argo. You may preserve the soul of our Chapter, but I preserve its body. I harvest the gene-seed of the fallen, and I ensure the wounded will fight again. So listen to me, brother. I fear nothing but allowing my failures to harm my brethren. I am not at peak performance, and I am unused to the wounds I still wear under this armour. That is the source of my unbalance.’

‘You lose your own argument. You fear to let down your brothers because your battle skills are hindered for a short while. Vayne, you are harming your brothers far more with your withdrawn attitude and the bitterness leaking from your every word. You are eroding their trust in you, and destroying their confidence.’

Argo’s battle-collar pulsed a single blip. He tensed his neck, activating the pearl-like vox-bead attached to his throat, which picked up the vibrations of his vocal chords.

‘Brother-Chaplain Argo. Speak.’

‘Brother-Chaplain,’ it was Lord General Ulviran. ‘I have a request to ask you and your warriors.’

‘I will be with you shortly,’ Argo said, and killed the link. The silence between Argo and Vayne returned.

‘Your point is taken,’ Vayne conceded. ‘I will not allow my melancholy to taint my squad any longer.’

‘That is all I demand.’ Argo was already turning to leave.

‘I remember a time when you could not make such demands of me, Argo.’

‘I remember a time when I did not need to make them.’

The Fists shed blood before the Guard’s night-time advance. Under Ulviran’s request, Argo and Demetrian led the squad into the shattered remains of the city’s western sector.

In the minutes leading up to deployment, Argo had gathered the warriors together in the shadow of their Thunderhawk. Dozens of Guardsmen around the camp looked on, dallying about their business while they watched the Astartes soldiers perform their rite. The Fists ignored them all.

With his gladius, Argo sliced the palms of each warrior’s left hand. They, in turn, pressed their bleeding hands against the chest piece of the Fist next to them.

Imrich rested his hand on the embossed silver eagle decorating Toma’s breastplate. The Larraman cells in his blood scabbed and sealed the gash quickly, but not before his palm left a dark smear on Toma’s Imperial symbol.

‘My life for you,’ Imrich said, then removed his hand and fastened his helm. Toma was next, pressing his bleeding hand against Vayne’s breastplate.

‘My life for you,’ the Deathwatch veteran said, before donning his own helm. Vayne forced a smile. He had to perform the rite with his remaining flesh hand, his right instead of his left, and did so without complaint.

When it came to the Chaplain’s turn, Argo rested his hand on Demetrian’s armour, as tradition necessitated the officiating Chaplain to honour the ranking officer.

‘My life for you,’ Argo said. A moment later, his senses were submerged in the audiovisual chaos of his battle helm. On the eye lens displays, he saw the flickering readouts of the squad’s vital signs, communication runes, lists of vox-channels, sight-altering lens options, thermo-conditional and local atmospheric readouts, and a cluster of information pertaining to the myriad functions of his armour.

All of the information added up to one thing.

‘Ready,’ he voxed to the others, blink-clicking most of the lens displays into transparency.

‘Ready,’ they voxed back. They’d started walking then, loping strides that emitted a chorus of mechanical growls from their armour joints. The Guardsmen parted like a split sea as the Astartes neared them.

With blood on their Imperial eagles, the Crimson Fists went to war.

That had been three hours ago. The Fists took a Guard Chimera troop transport to the city limits, and were advancing through the western edge of Southspire. It was a scouting run, and progress was predicted – by Lord General Ulviran – to be fast. Intelligence had pinned enemy resistance in this section of the city to be minimal. Only at the city’s centre was resistance expected to pick up.

Intelligence had been wrong about that.

Argo crouched in the ruins of what had once been an Administratum building, where hundreds of barely-educated wage slaves typed their lives away into cogitators that amassed Syral’s exportation data. Pressed against a wall half tumbled down months ago from Imperial Basilisk shelling, the Chaplain waited unmoving, listening to the thrum of his power armour and the sounds of several foes breathing nearby.

Roaming bands of greenskins claimed this part of the city. Squad Demetrian had abandoned the Chimera long before, in favour of stalking through the ruins and clearing a path for the Guard’s advance tonight.

Argo heard the xenos trampling closer, around the corner. They muttered to each other in their guttural, swinish tongue. The Chaplain tasted bile in his mouth. Their inhumanity repelled him.

He heard the bestial things pause in their lazy search, heard them snuffing at the air and grunting. They had his scent, he was sure of it, and his blood ran hot as he clenched his short combat sword in one hand, his bolter in the other.

At his hip hung his deactivated crozius arcanum, the symbolic weapon of his role in the Chapter. Capped by an eagle-shaped maul fashioned from blackened adamantium, it was a fearsome bludgeon when sheathed in its crackling power field. Argo’s crozius had belonged to Ancient Amentus, one of the first Crimson Fist Chaplains; a founder of the Chapter from when the primarch divided the Imperial Fists Legion ten millennia before. Upon an arm-length haft of dark metal, the inscription Traitor’s Bane was written in High Gothic.

He treasured the relic weapon, which still felt unfamiliar in his fists even after seven years. Against detritus such as these greenskins, his gladius was more than enough to suffice. He would not let the filthy blood of weakling xenos mar an honourable weapon dating back to the Great Crusade.

The first of the creatures, alert now, came around the corner. In its fists was a collection of scrap that evidently served the greenskin as a firearm. Argo surged to his feet, superhuman reflexes enhanced even further by his armour, and before the ork could utter a sound, it was falling backwards with the hilt of the Chaplain’s gladius protruding from its eye socket.

Argo rounded the corner to meet the others head-on and his bolter barked, spitting detonating shells into green flesh. Eleven of them. Each hulking figure was momentarily outlined by a flicker of light in his helm’s vision, cycling through target locks. But eleven was too many, even for an Astartes. In a flashing moment of anger, Argo cursed himself for not listening carefully to their breathing and trying to discern their numbers. It was his failing, he knew. He’d acted in rage, and now it was going to kill him.

The brutish creatures ran at him even as they took fire, massive fists gripping jagged axes that were pieced together from vehicle parts and industrial machinery. Argo’s bolter cut down three orks as his targeting reticule flitted between weak points in the greenskins’ piecemeal armour.

‘You dare exist in Mankind’s galaxy!’ Argo’s bolter spat its last shell which destroyed an ork from the jaw up. He clamped the weapon to his thigh with its magnetic seal and threw his fist forward, shattering the forehead of the first greenskin to come in range. ‘Die! Die knowing the Crimson Fists will cleanse the stars of your taint!’

Axes slashed towards him, which Argo weaved to avoid. A step back took him within reach of the first ork he’d felled, and he snatched up his gladius from the wretch’s skull. Rivulets of dark blood slid along the silver blade, and the Astartes grinned behind his death’s head mask.

‘Come, alien filth. I am Argo, son of Rogal Dorn, and I am your death.’ The mob of orks ran in and Argo met them, the primarch’s name on his lips.

‘Break left.’

The voice crackled over the vox and Argo obeyed instantly, throwing himself into a roll that scattered a dust cloud in the ruins of the building. He came up, blade in hand, just as the speaker joined him in the fight.

The midday sun flashed from Toma’s iron shoulder guard as he hammered the greenskins from behind. His bolter disgorged a stream of shells that exploded on impact in bursts of clear, hissing liquid. As he fired one-handed, he plunged his gladius into the throat of the closest greenskin, giving it a savage twist to half-sever the creature’s head. Four of the orks fell back, the horrendously potent acid from Toma’s prized bolt rounds overriding even the orkish resilience to pain as it ate through their flesh like holy fire.

All of this happened before Argo’s two hearts had time to beat twice.

The last two orks leapt at the Fists to die in futility. Toma impaled the first through the chest, shattered its face with a brutal headbutt, and fired a single bolt at point-blank range into the alien’s temple. The skull gave way in a shower of gore as the explosive shell performed its sacred function. Gobbets of flesh and bone hissed as they span away, eaten by the mutagenic acid in Toma’s Inquisition-sanctioned ammunition.

Argo grappled with the second ork, his gauntlets wrapped around the thing’s throat as it broke its thick nails scrabbling at his armour. He bore the howling greenskin to the ground, his weighty armour crushing the life from its chest as he strangled it in trembling fists.

‘Die…’

The ork’s answer was to roar voicelessly, its red eyes burning with rage. The Astartes grinned in mimicry of his helm and leaned close to the thing’s face. His voice was a whisper through his vox-speakers.

‘I hate you.’

Toma stood to the side, reloading his bolter and scanning the ruins for more foes. Argo’s skulled face pressed against the choking ork’s forehead. Orkish sweat left dark smears against his bone-cream faceplate.

‘This is the Emperor’s galaxy.’ With a final surge of effort, he squeezed with all his strength. Vertebrae popped and cracked under the pressure. ‘Mankind’s galaxy. Our galaxy. Know that, as your worthless life ends.’

‘Brother-Chaplain…’ Toma said.

Argo barely heard. He let the creature fall dead and rose to his feet, savouring the taste of copper, bitter and hot, on his tongue. His rage had not killed him, after all. The enemy lay dead in great numbers.

‘Brother-Chaplain,’ Toma repeated.

‘What?’ Argo unclasped his bolter, reloading it now with the proper litany to the machine-spirit within.

There was a moment when Argo was sure Toma would say something; chide him for letting his fury get the better of him and lead him into reckless combat. Despite the break with tradition and authority, Argo would have accepted the criticism from a warrior like Toma.

Toma said nothing, but the silence passing between the two Astartes was laden with meaning.

‘Report,’ Argo said to break the quiet.

‘Imrich and Vayne report their section is clear now. Brother-Sergeant Demetrian reports the same.’

‘Resistance?’

‘Vayne and Demetrian described it as savage.’

‘And Imrich?’

‘He described it as thrilling.’

Argo nodded. He was running low on ammunition, and knew the others must be as well.

‘Prepare for a withdrawal.’

As Toma voxed Argo’s orders to the others, the young Chaplain looked out across the ruined city. Small by Imperial standards – large settlements were rare on an agri-world – yet the focus of so much destruction.

On the other side of Southspire, the new warlord waited with the bulk of his horde. And in the heart of the city, the broken remains of the Cantorial Palace: the Fists’ true goal, surrounded by foes.

Argo’s blood boiled as he spat a curse behind his mask. He wanted to press on. The palace was no more than a handful of hours away, but resistance from the roaming warbands was intense. With another squad of Astartes, just five more men, he’d have taken the chance. But alone, it was suicide.

‘What’s that noise?’ Toma said.

Argo levelled his bolter. He’d heard it, too. Drums. The music of primitives, echoing across the city like the pounding heartbeat of an angry god.

‘It’s a warning.’

The Imperial Guard advanced that night, and the weather turned bitter as if the heavens recognised the humans’ intent.

Basilisks softened up the way ahead with relentless bombardments each hour. Ulviran was content to endure this halting advance, frequently cutting forward progress to establish another artillery barrage that took an age to set up. He pored over maps and holo-displays in his Baneblade’s command room as Imperial guns pounded their own city into dust.

The big push consisted of the surviving elements of the Radimir Third Rifles, Seventh Irregulars and Ninth Armoured. These were the so-called ‘Revenants’, named for the many times Radimir had replaced entire regiments due to losses against the greenskins in Segmentum Tempestus. Rebirth at the precipice of extinction was a blessing familiar to the Crimson Fists, and the Chapter had fought well with the soldiers of Radimir countless times across the centuries.

Hundreds of Guardsmen clad in the gunmetal grey of the Radimir Revenants marched alongside rattling Sentinels in the vanguard of the assault, flanked by Leman Russ battle tanks in half a dozen variants. Radimir was close to being a forge world in terms of its armoured exports. No Revenant regiment ever went to war short of armour support.

The bulk of Ulviran’s forces followed the vanguard: six thousand men including a detachment of storm-troopers serving as his ceremonial guard, riding alongside his Baneblade in eight black-painted Chimeras.

At the rear of this main force came the artillery: Griffons and Basilisks, their punishing guns stowed and locked until the next time Ulviran brought the column to a halt and ordered them to set up a shelling storm kilometres ahead.

Last of all came the rearguard, made of the lord general’s veteran Guard squads interspersed with auxiliary units, medical transports and supply trucks.

The Fists’ Thunderhawk gunship remained back at the abandoned base camp at the city’s edge, ready to be summoned. For a short while, until Argo scattered them, Squad Demetrian marched in the vanguard of the force, forming the vicious tip of the Imperium’s conquering blade. In scything rain and howling winds, as the elements battered down upon the miserable Imperial advance, the war to retake Southspire began. The Fists soon bled away into the night, leaving Argo alone.

Major Dace, who had been present in the Baneblade’s command room when Argo reported the Fists’ scouting run, couldn’t resist voxing the Chaplain now. Argo’s suit insulated him from the noise of the rain slashing against his ceramite armour, and he tensed his throat to activate his vox-bead as it chimed.

‘Brother-Chaplain Argo. Speak.’

‘This is Major Dace of the Revenants.’ Argo smiled as he heard the voice. The ritual processes that had moulded his body like clay, forming him into an Astartes, had given him a memory close to eidetic. It was known by most imperial commanders who worked with Astartes that Space Marines possessed preternatural capacities for instant recollection.

‘Have we met?’ Argo asked with his half-smile in place. He didn’t let his amusement leak into his voice. It had the desired effect; Dace’s feathers were ruffled.

‘I don’t see your foretold resistance, Brother-Chaplain. All is quiet on the advance, is it not?’

‘I can still hear the drums,’ Argo noted. And he could, setting a distant rhythmic percussion to the thunder grinding across the sky.

‘I can’t,’ Dace said.

‘You are comfortably hidden in a tank, major.’ Argo closed the link and added, ‘And you are only human.’

The Fists had been killing greenskins their entire unnaturally long lives. Ulviran, no stranger to the orkish hordes himself, trusted Argo’s belief that the drums pounded as a challenge to the Imperials. The new warlord, a curse upon his black heart, knew they were coming, and the drums of war beat to show he welcomed the coming bloodshed. The storm swallowed their noise now. Only the Astartes could make it out, and it was dimmed even to their senses.

‘Ulviran to all units,’ crackled the lord general’s hourly message. ‘Dig in for bombardment. Shelling to commence in thirty minutes.’

Argo bit back a curse. Too slow, much too slow. His thoughts were plagued by the Thunderhawk full of digging equipment back at the base.

‘Brother-Chaplain?’

The communication rune that flashed on his reddish lens display was, thankfully, not Dace. Imrich’s vital signs registered as almost a kilometre ahead.

‘How goes the scouting, Brother Imrich?’

‘Lord,’ Imrich responded, speaking quietly and clearly. ‘I’ve found the kine.’

‘So have I, sir.’ This was Vayne, a kilometre to the west.

‘Contact,’ voxed Demetrian. His readouts pinned him in the south.

Argo looked over his shoulder, at the procession of ocean-grey tanks with rain sluicing off their hulls.

‘Numbers?’ he asked them all over the squad’s shared channel. The weather was banishing vox integrity, masking all the words in a haze of crackles and hisses.

‘I count over a thousand, easily,’ Vayne said. ‘Perhaps two.’

‘Same,’ added Demetrian.

‘I’ve got more. I’ve got lots more.’ Imrich sounded overjoyed. But then, knowing Imrich, he probably was. ‘Twice that number, I’m sure of it. If we hear from Toma,’ Imrich added, ‘we’re in a world of trouble.’

The Deathwatch specialist had been sent to the south, stalking a good distance behind the rearguard.

The vox clicked live again. ‘Brother-Chaplain, come in.’ said Toma. The rest of his message was cut off by Imrich’s delighted laughter.

With a cold feeling of metallic-tasting finality in his throat, Argo voxed the lord general.

Ulviran listened without hesitation. He ignored Dace’s complaints and pulled the column into a still-advancing defensive spread that, admirably, took less than half an hour to form. No small feat for that many soldiers and vehicles. The organisational aspects of war were where Ulviran most prided himself. An orderly army was a victorious one. The faster orders were obeyed, the more men survived. It was a simple mathematic he liked, and had a talent for putting it into practice.

‘The shelling,’ Argo voxed to him, ‘is doing nothing. The warlord has put significant force into the city against us, and the horde ahead is falling back to draw us in.’

Ulviran glared down at the hololithic display of the city projected onto the large table. His Baneblade rumbled as it rolled on.

‘We’re surrounded.’

‘If we stop now, lord general, we will be. The pincers will close around us the moment we halt. If we push on at speed, we can make it to the Cantorial Palace and engage the forward elements before the rest of the noose can close around our throats.’

Ulviran liked that. Turn the ambush into an attack.

‘Strike first, strike hard, and prepare to repel the rest of the attackers once the main force is crushed.’ It sounded good. It sounded right. But…

‘I am going purely on your word for this, Brother-Chaplain.’

‘Good,’ the Astartes replied, and ended the link.

‘The Cantorial Palace?’ voxed Demetrian.

‘Yes. Squad, form up. We’re taking the prize.’

The Cantorial Palace had been the seat of the planetary governor, and a masterpiece of gothic design; as skeletally, broodingly Imperial as would be expected.

All that remained was a series of shattered walls and a small mountain of rubble, where once battlements and ridged towers had risen around a central bastion. The previous greenskin warlord had claimed it as his lair, until the Crimson Fists had dissuaded him of the notion four months ago. Refuting his claim of ownership involved razing the building to the ground with infiltrating sappers, and even then, the gigantic xenos clad in its primitive power armour had survived to claw itself free from the smoking rubble.

Imrich had battled the warlord in the stone wreckage, finally taking its head after a long and bloody duel. He wore Warlord Golgorrad’s skull on his bandolier, giving it pride of place on his chest.

The ork forces of this nameless new warlord evidently favoured the former site of battle. It was to be the anvil upon which the Imperial forces would be crushed by the flanking hordes.

Ulviran’s army did not march sedately to a doom surrounded by foes. Time was of the essence, and the Revenants powered on to meet the larger force ahead. Men held to the side of speeding tanks and rode atop vehicle roofs. Within the hour, the Guard spilled with overwhelming force into the great plaza district where the Cantorial Palace’s bones jutted from the ground.

The armoured fist of the Revenant advance crashed into the scattered greenskin lines. Rubble rained down as tanks unleashed the fury of their cannons, and a staccato chorus of heavy bolter fire filled the air between the thunder of main guns. Lacking entrenchments, the orks counter-charged the armoured column, finding walls of Imperial Guard coming to meet them. Las-fire sliced across the night, illuminating the battlefield like some hellish pre-dawn in scarlet sunlight.

The rain lashed down on troopers in cold-weather gear as they fired in disciplined ranks, and the orks still came on in a roaring wave that drowned out the sound of thunder above.

Imperial records came to know this battle as the Night of the Axe, when the Radimir regiments on Syral were decimated by the hordes of xenos creatures they faced. Losses stood at forty-six per cent, utterly damning Lord General Ulviran’s planned big push to face the new warlord that still lay in wait on the other side of the city. The Guard was bloody and beaten, and although thousands survived the assault, it was nowhere near enough to storm the warlord’s position with any hope of success. The Radimir’s one slim hope of survival on the kine-infested world – to strike the warlord down and cast the hordes into disarray – was gone. In turning the ambush into an attack of their own, the Guard had delayed their destruction but not avoided it.

However, for the purposes of the Crimson Fists, the Night of the Axe was neither the most critical juncture in the war for Syral, nor was it even recorded in their rolls of honour despite the harvest of lives reaped by Squad Demetrian of the Fifth Company.

The Fists, in true Astartes autonomy, had a sacred duty of their own to perform. This came to light the following morning, as the broken Guard made to move on from the scene of slaughter.

The sector was a mess of bloodshed and battle fallout. The corpses of thousands of orks and humans lay scattered over a square kilometre of annihilated urban terrain. The air thrummed with the growl of engines, frequently split by the cries of wounded men ringing out as they were tended by medics or died in agony, unfound among the charnel chaos that littered the ground.

Argo walked among the dead, gladius plunging down to end the lives of any greenskins that still drew breath. He listened to the general vox-channel as he performed his bloody work, making a mental note of casualties suffered by the Guard. He knew they were sure to be destroyed if they pressed on to face the warlord, just as surely as they’d be destroyed when the warlord’s armies came hunting for them. He felt a moment of pity for the Guard. The Revenants were brave souls who’d always stood their ground in the face of the enemy. It was a shame to see them expire like this, in utter futility.

But the Fists would be long gone by then.

As he approached the edge of the colossal vista of rubble that made up the bones of the Cantorial Palace, he activated his vox and sent the signal he’d ached to send since his arrival. A single acknowledgement blip was the only answer he received, and the only answer he required.

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. Gene-seed 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 live.

The name registered at last, a moment before Vayne and Demetrian brought the figure close enough to recognise. Hollow-cheeked, 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.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2009 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Hardy Fowler

© Games Workshop Limited, 2009, 2011. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2011, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-85787-224-1

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.