THE SUREST WEAPON
Nick Kyme

Even though he knew it was coming, the blow still took Vadeth by surprise. A welt of pain spread slowly through his cheek as the bone strength was tested, and hot knives raked his skin where the mail of his attacker's fist bit into flesh.
He tasted blood, warm from where the cut bled down into his mouth. Three teeth were loose, and his jaw cracked ominously when he tried to speak.
'Quiet!' snapped the attacker. 'In here, you have no voice. The weak are not afforded this privilege. All there is for you is suffering.'
Fresh pain surged through Vadeth's back and chest as he strained against his bonds. The manacles bit into his wrists, and he imagined all the ways he would kill this man before him. A bulky silhouette. A shadow possessed of menace and malice. Vadeth didn't know who his tormentor was, nor did he recognise the voice in his dazed state, but he vowed in that moment, strapped to that chair, that he would seek this craven out and brutally despatch him.
As thoughts of revenge manifested, Vadeth looked up. One of his eyes was nearly sealed shut and he could feel there was blood all over his face, but the glare he gave to his shadowy aggressor spoke of his desire for vengeance and a promise of retribution.
The beating stopped. Suddenly and inexplicably the mood in the small, dark room changed. Vadeth heard footsteps as the attacker backed off. He wondered if he was going for a weapon, or some tool to extract further agony and humiliation.
'Good,' said the attacker, his voice neutral, almost approving.
Vadeth kept glaring, feeling his hate turn into something tangible that he could clench in his fists.
'You are ready.' With those final words, his attacker left the room.
It took Vadeth a few seconds to realise he was not alone.
Breathing, laboured and irregular. Their breaths overlaid and contradicted one another. Vadeth discerned two other individuals including himself. Prisoners, as he was.
He remembered little of the battle, which was unusual in itself as Adeptus Astartes had perfect eidetic recall. Yet, there were some elements of his memory missing. They didn't feel gone as such, just… indistinct. Cloudy. Either poison or some kind of psychic infiltration.
Xenos. He remembered that part. He and his brothers had been purging a colony of vermin that had crossed their path. It seemed the eldar had use for salvage as well - two factions of them, going at it tooth and nail. They had all looked like raiders to Vadeth's eyes, but Gaust had assured him they were of different castes.
'Here, brother,' the hoary veteran had said. Gaust was his sergeant, but Vadeth was on the verge of leaving the old warrior's squad to join the Malevolent's elite, the Vilifiers. If this battle went well, if Vadeth acquitted himself with the brutality and efficiency he knew he was capable of and had done so thus far during this latest puni¬tive campaign in the Heklion Cluster, his place amongst the Vilifiers would be guaranteed.
Gaust had pointed one patched-up, gauntleted finger. The glove was from a different suit of armour, a different Chapter in fact. One of the Techmarines had given it a cursory repaint but the rigours of war and Gaust's own indifference towards maintenance had allowed some of the old colour and iconography to bleed through the black and yellow Marines Malevolent livery.
'See. One, pirates. The other, rangers. They are both outcasts, skir¬mishers and scrappers. Whatever hoard they fight over must be worth all of this blood.'
The two eldar factions were killing each other. Bodies lay strewn across a verdant battlefield, now scarred by fire and corpses. The edi¬fice they both clamoured to enter had looked like a tomb to Vadeth's eyes. Perhaps it was an armoury, as Gaust had suggested. Either way, it was plunder too valuable to ignore.
The order came down from Captain Vinyar, observing the conflict from the Purgatory in low orbit above them. The ship was so vast it had been visible in the night sky, crowding out the twin moons and obliterating stars with its presence. If the xenos had seen it, they did not seem to care. All that mattered was the white bone tomb and the prize within it.
Thirty heavily booted feet had tramped over the rise, inflicting fur¬ther injury on the once bucolic landscape. Vadeth had been in the lead with Gaust and the rest of the squad. First had come war shouts, spat from every Malevolent's mouth, then the bolters. Back when he was a Scout, each neophyte had been taught by his taskmaster to fire in short bursts.
'Spare your shells,' the grizzled trainers had often barked. 'You have teeth on your blades and in your mouths. Use them, but know they are not your surest weapon.'
A xenos body jerked as one of Vadeth's shells hit it. Hooded cloak, light tan armour that looked like fibrous wool - the alien's armour was no protection against a mass-reactive round. It had exploded violently, torso and legs separating, and showered its kin and foes alike with blood. The distraction was useful. It sowed further con¬fusion. One more burst, six paltry shells in total, had been all that Vadeth expended before he waded in with the saw.
Gaust wielded a mattock. It had a power field generator that mani¬fested as a minute electrical charge around the hammer's head. Wafts of corposant drifted down the haft, bleeding off its killing end as Gaust went about his task with mechanical pugilism.
The eldar were more proficient at close quarters. Vadeth duelled with one. It wore black, segmented armour of a distinctly insect-like aspect, with barbs on the shoulders, elbows and knees. In the sprawl¬ing melee that had erupted across the largely barren plains, both factions had become embroiled with the Space Marines.
Vadeth took a blow against his upper armour. The eldar had an energy lash that snagged the limb and proceeded to burn through the baseplate's ceramite casing. Despite the pain, Vadeth seized the taut whipline and yanked his enemy towards him. A headbutt connected with the xenos's face as they met, caving in the nose and much of the left cheek. Blood and bone rained down Vadeth's face-plate, and the whip around his arm went slack. He used it to strangle one of the other xenos.
Only a handful remained. They had banded together, in spite of their ostensible differences. Raised bolters hemmed them in, an ever-decreasing circle of bile-yellow power armour constricting around them like a hangman's noose.
Vadeth remembered only fragments after that moment, after he had turned to Gaust to compare stories of their acts of prowess dur¬ing the battle. He remembered Gaust's chest and the chasm within it coring him open. He had burbled something, blood drooling over his bottom lip as his insides were slowly liquified. Vadeth couldn't make out what it was. His gaze had been drawn to Gaust's slayer.
The auspex was foul with whatever churned cud was infecting the air. Vision was impaired by the self same leaf gruel the Malevolents had disturbed when they had charged across the plain. Vadeth had seen an outline of power armour, distant enough to be vague but not so far that he did not recognise the meltagun in the figure's hands.
More shouting, this time in urgency not battle fervour. Regroup. Redeploy. Survive.
An object had rolled over to Vadeth. He looked down at it, sitting innocuously at his feet. The grenade exploded. Vadeth's world had turned black. He had awoken an indeterminate time later in the cell.
Lights flared, not stark, but coming from abject darkness it took Vadeth a few seconds to adjust to them. The two others with him were eldar, one of each faction. Belatedly, Vadeth realised there were three factions, and the Marines Malevolent were one of them. They were all prisoners. The figure with the meltagun, a vanguard of another force, a renegade warband. The Malevolents had either lost the battle or had left him for dead.
There was something jutting from Vadeth's chest. He had only just noticed it, but now that he did, it burned. The bindings around his wrists and ankles broke apart, the shackles clattering to the ground noisily. There was no time to clutch at the thing burning into his skin. The eldar were free too. Something about their eyes… Vadeth saw fury. Unreasoning. Pure. He was the focus of it. Snarling, the xenos flew at him. No weapons, just brawn and determination.
Vadeth was hurting. Slow. He had been worked over much more severely than his fellow prisoners. The xenos were wiry, but still strong and well-conditioned in spite of captivity. One clambered onto Vadeth's back as he flailed, trying to remove it. The other rained blows against his face, torso and neck. Again, in his weakened state, Vadeth's defence was poor. As the blood welled fresh in his mouth and he spat out a tooth, the darkness crept inexorably at the edge of his vision - he realised they were beating him to death. As formida¬ble as he was, Vadeth was going to die unless something changed.
Defiance at his allotted fate flourished first. It got him up from his knees and onto his feet again. It lasted for a few seconds before the xenos harrying his body swept his trembling legs from beneath him. His throat was being crushed, two bony hands wrapped around it, squeezing. A kick to the side of the head drew sparks in front of his eyes and a dull throb that sounded ominous.
To	be laid low by this scum went against everything his Chapter stood for, against their sense of superiority and xenophobia, the belief in their pre-eminence and intolerance of any deviance. These creatures were abominations. They were lesser than Vadeth in every way.
Thou shalt not suffer the alien to live.
Vadeth's dislocated jaw prevented him from saying the words but he felt every word of it. He felt a well of hate surging up within him that drove him, burning, to his feet. He roared, a mangled, dis¬cordant shout of undisputed fury. He broke the thing on his back by ramming it against the wall. The other he pummelled to death with his elbows and fists. In seconds it was over and Vadeth was left bloody and adrenalized. The lights flared again, so bright he had to shade his eyes with one bloody hand.
A figure was standing before him. It spoke in the same voice as earlier.
'What is the surest weapon?'
Vadeth couldn't answer. He could barely see. Lowering his hand, he was readying to fight on when he saw the sergeant in bile-yellow and coal-black livery.
Marines Malevolent. My Chapter.
It wasn't really a question. It was merely a part of their mantra. Vadeth had provided a physical statement of the other part in the battered bodies at his feet.
'Look down,' said the sergeant. His name was Kastor and he was wearing some of Gaust's armour, as well as carrying his power ham¬mer. A man would kill for a weapon such as that.
There was a shard jutting out of Vadeth's chest, stone-like and crimson in colour. As he looked upon it, he felt his hate rekindled but was able to master it.
'That's what was in the tomb. Not a weapon, not as such,' Kastor told him, 'but just that. It drove them frenzied. It even worked its way into Brother Igrat. He killed your old sergeant before Clytok destroyed most of the rock. The red haze lifted in us after that. What's left is embedded in you. It afforded an opportunity. I decided to use it as your test. Initiation. This one was unique.'
Dazed and battered, it took Vadeth a few minutes to recall who Kastor was. He led the Vilifiers, and was one of the most vicious fighters ever to have graced the Chapter.
'I needed to see,' said Kastor, 'if you could embody everything we are. If your hatred outweighed theirs, even with the shard driving them to madness.'
Vadeth said nothing. Even if he had words for Kastor, he couldn't speak them anyway. His eyes spoke for him, burning with contempt.
Kastor smiled, his scarred, grizzled visage at odds with the expression.
'You are a Vilifier now, Vadeth. And you won't need this any¬more, either.' He reached out, tore the shard from Vadeth's flesh and crushed it in his mailed fist. 'You have learned your most important lesson. Our mantra is not merely just words. It's truth. Hate, brother,' he said, recognising the lingering fury in Vadeth's eyes. 'Hate com¬pels us. It drives us. Keener than any sword. More enduring than any starship or fort. Colder than Fenrisian ice.'
Kastor held out his hand to seal the oath of inducting a recruit to the Vilifiers.
Vadeth struck him instead, so hard it put the sergeant on one knee.
Spitting out a gobbet of blood, Kastor smiled as he looked up at his latest charge.
'Yes, brother. Now you see it, don't you? Hate is the surest weapon.'