Dawn Of War II

by Chris Roberson

  'Blood Ravens,' Captain Davian Thule said, his voice booming even over the plaintive howl of the winds from across the desert. 'It does my heart good to welcome you here. Calderis has long been a recruiting world of the Blood Ravens, and for generations we have come here to select only the best and most capable of Calderians to join the ranks of the Chapter.'

  Beside the captain stood Chaplain Palmarius, his midnight-black power suit dusted with the dun-coloured sands that blew continually across the landing pad, and which were already gritting in the joints of Aramus's own armour. The Chaplain's face, as always, was completely hidden behind his silver skull mask, but through the eye slits Aramus could see Palmarius's eyes sliding back and forth, taking the measure of the reinforcements.

  'If we fail in our duty here,' Thule went on, 'that proud tradition will be at an end, and never again will the sons of Calderis swell the ranks of the Blood Ravens.'

  The captain pointed to a small knot of boys that huddled together against the scouring winds, flanked on either side by a Blood Ravens Scout. There were no more than a half-dozen of the boys, most of them bandaged or limping, and nearly all with a haunted look in their dark eyes, as though they had seen things that no mortal soul should be expected to survive.

  'Two months ago we came to this world with the sacred charge of conducting the Blood Trials, of sifting through the populace of Calderis to find the most suitable candidates for our holy Chapter, and then to pit them one against another in combat to test their worthiness. More than a month since, the attack of the feral orks put paid to those plans. Many of the aspirants already gathered in our search fell before the greenskin tide, and these few you see before you are all that is left of the original number.'

  Aramus regarded the boys. They looked numb, beyond pain and without fear. It was a look he had come to recognize during his own initiation into the ranks of the Space Marines, but he knew that if the boys were to survive whatever was to come and become initiates, they would face trials and pains far greater than any they had yet seen. Some of the injuries borne by the boys seemed severe, though, and might threaten to end their lives before their initiation ever began. Apothecary Gordian would have to examine them, once he finished seeing to the party's injured Librarian, whom Gordian had been ordered to attend as soon as they touched down.

  'In the face of the encroaching orks, many of the civilians who dwelt in the deserts surrounding us have taken flight, seeking refuge behind the walls of Argus Township.' Thule waved a gauntleted fist towards the east and the walls of Argus proper. 'Once the principal urban centre on Calderis, Argus is now a place of final refuge, the last stand for humanity on the planet.'

  Aramus glanced to the east, and saw the barricades being manned by more of the Blood Ravens Scouts.

  With three gunships on the ferrocrete, panicked refugees had swarmed the barricades, desperate for any means of escape from Calderis and the orks threatening to overrun them. So far the Scouts had not been forced to open fire on the inhabitants to keep them from reaching the Thunderhawks - where their numbers and blind panic might drive them to do serious damage to the craft - but from Aramus's perspective it seemed as though it would only be a matter of time.

  'If there are any potential Blood Ravens still among the surviving inhabitants of Calderis,' Thule continued, 'they are to be found in Argus, or else already en route through the deserts to the township. It falls to us to search the population for these potential recruits, to gather and protect any that we find, and to return to Scientia Est Potentia with them. If we must hold the Blood Trials onboard our own fortress-monastery, so be it, but at least then our sacred duty will have been discharged and we may return to the Fifth Company with honour.'

  The captain paced for a moment, back and forth in front of the assembled squads, regarding each of them individually.

  'The vessel which carried our recruiting party to Calderis is not due to return for another two months,' Thule went on, 'and I, for one, have no intention of remaining here for their return. With the Armageddon in orbit overhead, and her Thunderhawks here on the ground, there is no reason that we cannot complete the remainder of our mission in a matter of days, a week at the most, and then quit this world once and for all.'

  Thule paused, the eyes behind his helmet gazing across the armoured forms before him.

  'You have your orders. Search the population for potential aspirants, gather them together, and protect them. Is there a one of you who harbours any questions, or requires any clarification?'

  A moment of silence passed, and then Aramus indicated with a raised gauntlet that he had a question.

  'Captain?' Aramus began when Thule motioned him to speak. 'It is my understanding that the feral orks beyond the mountains have never before attacked the human settlements on this hemisphere. What drives them now to attack in such numbers?'

  'We don't know,' Thule answered without hesitation. 'All that we do know is that they have attacked, and that it falls to us to respond. At this stage, nothing else matters.' He paused, his gaze sweeping the others. 'Are there any further questions or request for clarification?'

  The assembled squads were silent, knowing that no reply was required if the answer was in the negative.

  'In that case, there is nothing to be gained from further discussion. To your duty, Blood Ravens, and may the Emperor guide you!'

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE DIN OF the feral ork horde hit Sergeant Thaddeus with the force of a tidal wave, followed quickly by the stench of the greenskins themselves. His assault squad, armed with bolters and chainswords, had been tasked with clearing a path through the ocean of orks to the south of Argus Township. Orbital surveillance transmitted by vox from the Armageddon had pinpointed a group of human refugees trapped beyond the besieging horde in that direction, and unless Thaddeus and the Blood Ravens of the Seventh Squad were able to escort them through to the relative safety of the walls of Argus, it would matter not at all whether there were among the refugees any potential candidates for initiation or not. And so, their jump packs granting them the ability to make prodigious leaps from the high city walls directly into the midst of the greenskin horde, Thaddeus ordered his men to engage.

  'On your left,' Thaddeus voxed to his battle-brothers, as his own chainsword bit into the nearest of the green-skinned monsters, almost before the orks had realized the assault squad was among them.

  The giant ork who had responded quickest to the sudden appearance of the Blood Ravens among them, and who had prompted Thaddeus's shout of warning, swung a massive, cruelly barbed and irregularly-shaped sword at the nearest of the Space Marines, who barely managed to dance back out of range of the sweeping blade. As the giant ork reversed his sword for another swing, a howl of incoherent rage reverberating through cracked teeth and rubbery lips, Thaddeus darted forward, chainsword whirring, and took a hunk from one of the ork's massive legs.

  Bellowing in outraged pain, the ork backhanded Thaddeus with his free hand, the blow striking the Blood Raven with force almost sufficient to knock him off balance. As it was, Thaddeus managed to right himself in time to parry the ork's next thrust. Even with a large part of one of his legs sheared away, the ork continued to fight, merely shifting his weight onto his other leg and using the pain and rage to fuel his attacks.

  It would take more than the loss of a bit of flesh and gristle for a full-grown ork to lie down. But then, brutal close combat was precisely the sort of fighting in which assault squads like the Seventh specialized.

  'Thaddeus!' shouted Battle-Brother Loew. 'On your right.'

  A stream of rounds from Loew's bolter streamed by Thaddeus's right shoulder before the sergeant could even respond, followed closely by an outraged roar from the direction in which the shots had been fired.

  It was an impossibly loud roar, a sound of fury and of pain as inhuman as the bellowing calls of the greenskins but unlike any ork voice that Thaddeus had ever heard.

  The ork with the barbed sword rushed forward for an
other lunge, and Thaddeus jinked to one side, at the same time sweeping his chainsword in and down, biting into the ork's as yet uninjured leg. This time Thaddeus's chainsword cut through the skin and meat of the greenskin's leg until it hit bone, and as the sergeant yanked his weapon free the whirling blade rasped against the sides of the wound, sending up a greenish-black mist of liquefied flesh, black ichor, and pulverized bone.

  With one leg cut straight through to the bone and the other already missing a significant hunk of flesh, the ork was left unbalanced, and while the monster struggled to retain its footing, howling in pain, Thaddeus opened fire with his own bolter, sending a stream of rounds directly into the ork's wide chest, shattering the necklace of teeth that surrounded the tree-trunk neck. The force of the bolts' impact toppled the ork backwards, and without wasting an instant's advantage, Thaddeus leapt into the air a few metres and came crashing down on the supine monster's chest. Swinging his chainsword like a farmer cutting wheat with a scythe, Thaddeus cleaved the head of the ork from his massive shoulders, ending forever his bellowing rage.

  Again Loew sent a stream of bolter fire across Thaddeus's back, and again the sergeant heard the inhuman roar of outrage and pain.

  Raising his sword and swinging up the barrel of his bolter, Thaddeus spun around to view the source of the clamour, and found himself face to face with a monster from humanity's oldest nightmares. It was a giant boar, as large as a land speeder, each of its immense tusks as long as a man's leg, with viscous saliva glistening on its slavering jaws and falling like swollen raindrops onto the dry sands between its massive hooves. On the boar's back was an ork, dressed in barbaric finery with furs, necklaces of teeth, and a helmet made from another ork's bleached skull, in its hand a long lance with an explosive package strapped to its end, with a dozen more such lances in a quiver across the ork's back.

  'That's more like it.' Thaddeus grinned and raised his whirring chainsword. 'I was beginning to worry that this would be too easy.'

  'VOIRE, YOU'RE WITH me.'

  Sergeant Aramus walked up the middle of the narrow street, heading towards the northern extremity of Argus. In more peaceful times, this street would have been lined on either side with vendors selling their wares, calling out to passers-by from stalls cobbled together from discarded sheets of flak board or rockcrete slabs, accented with remnants of colourful cloth - the larger pieces used as awnings overhead to shade the bright desert sun, the smaller fragments used merely as garlands. Everything from produce to craftwork to antiquities recovered from the timeless desert sands, things built, borrowed, bought, or stolen offered at whatever price they could demand. Argus Township was seen by the Calderians as a permanently-stationed souq, the ancient structures first built by the early colonists in millennia past a static answer to the ever moving, always transient tent communities of the open desert, and like those migrating souqs Argus was perforce a place of trade, a temple to barter and a celebration of haggling. There was nothing that could be found on Calderis that could not be bought in the streets of Argus - or at least rented, for a time - and quite a few things on offer in the more discreet market stalls that could not be found anywhere else on the desert planet.

  That was what Argus had been, before the coming of the feral orks. Now, it was a different matter entirely.

  'The rest of you,' Aramus called to the five remaining members of Third Squad when Battle-Brother Voire had joined him. 'Two search parties, one under Sergeant Tarkus' - he nodded to his second - 'the other under Brother Cirrac.' He pointed to the intersection up ahead, where another street crossed the one he now walked upon. 'Tarkus, you take your team up the left branch, Cirrac, you take the right. We'll meet at the north wall, compare notes, and proceed from there.'

  Argus was now a community under siege. The high city walls, designed to block out even the strongest of desert sandstorms, had been fortified by Thule's forces before the arrival of the Armageddon, and with the Scouts manning the barricades with the heaviest weaponry they had at their disposal, augmented by the braver Calderians who could be trained to operate a meltagun or fire a cannon, they had so far managed to keep incursions within the city by the orks beyond to a minimum. Already, though, there were breaks in the walls, here and there, which could fall before the orks should the greenskins organise their attacks in a concerted effort.

  The streets of Argus, no longer a marketplace where anything and everything was on offer, were now filled with huddled masses of refugees, thousands upon thousands of desert-dwellers and town-denizens packed together in a space capable of supporting only a fraction of their number. The availability of foodstuffs had long been a problem, and now the supplies of fresh water were quickly being depleted. The presence of the Blood Ravens in the city was helping to calm the citizenry from outright panic, but it would be only a matter of time before they realized that even the Space Marines would be able only to delay the inevitable, and that the fall of Argus to the orks was an unavoidable inevitability.

  'Aramus,' Voire said, pointing to a group cowering in the slim shade offered by a ramshackle stall in the lees of one of the ancient township buildings. There was an old woman, matriarch to an unmatched collection of men and women who were looking after an assortment of children of varying ages. Had they been an extended family, once upon a time, and the old woman the eldest surviving member? Or were they simply the straggling remains of one of the desert tribes, banded together out of familiarity when the rest of their families were lost in the flight across the burning sands?

  Aramus saw the boy to which Voire was pointing. Perhaps ten years old, tall for his age and lean, the boy appeared bright and alert, and while he was no doubt as hungry as the rest of the refugees huddling in the shade of the stall around him, he was cleanlimbed and healthy-seeming, the muscles of his calves and biceps not yet ravaged by starvation.

  'Let's take a look,' Aramus answered, and diverted his course towards the stall.

  Most of the men and women, like the children, averted their eyes at the approach of an Adeptus Astartes in full power armour with a bolter in hand, but the old woman kept her chin high and met Aramus's gaze, for all that she could not see his face behind his helmet.

  'I am Sergeant Aramus of the Blood Ravens, seeking aspirants for our Chapter.'

  The children at his feet began to whimper, and it seemed to Aramus as if they feared him perhaps as much as they feared the greenskins who had destroyed the only life they'd ever known.

  Aramus didn't know that he could blame them. He tried to imagine what it must be like to look upon a Space Marine for the first time, barely able to remember what it was like to be human himself. But he could remember, and too well, the undertaking on Kronus, the Dark Crusade in which he, like the other Blood Ravens under Captain Thule's command, had been forced by circumstance to turn against the misguided citizens who had taken up arms against the Chapter. The injuries sustained by the Blood Ravens in that undertaking had healed, but there were some scars - those which could not be seen on the surface - which might never fade.

  'Among the tribes of the desert,' the old woman began in heavily accented Low Gothic, her voice as dry as the deserts themselves, 'one who seeks favours with his face hidden is considered to be cuffar.' It was the Calderian term for a person who denied hospitality, or who was ungrateful. 'Am I to truck with cuffar for the lives of the last sons of my people?'

  Aramus remained motionless, regarding the ancient woman. Like most Space Marines, he had little talent or patience for anything resembling diplomacy. He was built and trained as a warrior, and his few dealings with the common citizenry of the Imperium were typically restricted to barking orders at them in frenzied evacuations, or else rushing past them as they fled from the enemies that the Blood Ravens charged forward to meet. He had enough strength in one gauntleted hand to crush the old woman to a pulp…

  And yet, what would it gain the Imperium if he were to do so? She was not his enemy. She was a scared old woman, defiant in the face of impossibl
e odds, and insisting to the universe around her that it conform to her long-cherished traditions of propriety and hospitality in what little time remained to her in this life. So she failed to show the deference due to an Adeptus Astartes? What of it? In her eyes, Aramus had surely failed to show her the deference that was her due as elder of her now-lost desert tribe.

  Before answering, Aramus reached up and removed his helmet. Holding it under his arm, with the dry wind buffeting against his bare neck and cheeks, he looked down again at the old woman, meeting her eyes with his own.

  'I am Sergeant Aramus of the Blood Ravens,' he repeated in gentler tones, 'and I come seeking aspirants for our Chapter.'

  The old woman nodded, and glanced around her at the children huddling terrified in the shade. 'And which of the sons of my tribe pleases your eye?'

  Aramus pointed at the clean-limbed youngster whom Voire had indicated.

  The ancient woman looked from Aramus to the boy and back again. 'And if he goes with you, he will become like you.' She pointed a bony finger at Aramus's armoured chest. ' Melik-a-sayf?'

  The old woman had no other word for what Aramus was, and so had used the Calderian term - ''Sword of the Emperor''.

  'Perhaps,' Aramus answered. 'If he survives the Blood Trials, and the initiation that follows.'

  The old woman narrowed her eyes. 'And if he does not become melik-a-sayf he will die?'

  'Perhaps,' Aramus said again. 'But there is the chance that he could fail the process and survive, to serve the Blood Ravens as a Chapter serf. It is not a common occurrence, but has been known to happen.'