As a consequence, the minds of even the most highly trained Adeptus Astartes were not acquainted with long periods of inactivity, used instead to a near-constant influx of stimulation and information. When a Space Marine entered a state of suspended animation, however, their body regulated at the threshold between life and death by their sus-an membrane, the brain received virtually no stimulus, not even the low-level rapid eye movement activity experienced in dreams. Thus deprived of stimulus, the mind of a Space Marine in suspended animation would, when revived, temporarily find it difficult once more to process the cascade of new information flooding in. And in the case of a psyker like Librarian Niven, who experienced the world with a greater number of senses than the average Space Marine, the process of acclimatising once more to their world beyond their skulls could be an even more difficult one.
Still, Niven's repeated insistence that the Great Devourer was upon them was troubling. Gordian had heard Thule's all-points vox about the tyranid that had been discovered in the city, and a short while later had received a point-to-point vox from Sergeant Aramus, who was bringing the injured Thule to the spaceport and calling ahead for Gordian's assistance. But from all accounts, there was only the single tyranid in Argus Township, perhaps only the one on all of Calderis, and if Aramus's estimation was correct it had been hatched from a seed brought to this world for unknown reasons. A single tyranid warrior was a threat, as evidenced by the injuries sustained by Captain Thule, but it was hardly a cause for general alarm, much less the repeated litany of the Librarian's warnings about the Great Devourer.
But were Niven's warnings more than just the distress of a recently revived mind, struggling to make sense of the incoming flood of sensory information? Was there more to the tyranid threat than was immediately obvious?
The two Thunderhawks on the landing pad were ready for lift-off, each with a Scout of the Blood Ravens Chapter at the helm. The aspirants gathered in the recent weeks had been loaded onto one of them, and the Blood Ravens of the Third Squad stood sentry around the other, waiting for the arrival of their squad leader and the captain. Chaplain Palmarius was on board the Thunderhawk with the aspirants, instructing them in any number of hymns and liturgies which Palmarius felt would be of use at the present moment, all the while taking the measure of each of the dozen aspirants, already beginning the lengthy examinations that would only end when they were installed as full battle-brothers - if they only lived that long.
As Apothecary Gordian escorted Librarian Niven across the landing pad, and entrusted him to the care of the Third Squad who guarded the Thunderhawks, he received a vox message from Sergeant Aramus.
'Aramus to squad. We're at the spaceport and in need of assistance.'
Brother Voire of the Third Squad led Librarian Niven to the Thunderhawk, while Brother Cirrac and Gordian both turned to look for the source of Aramus's transmission. A moment later they both caught sight of Aramus hurrying towards the landing pad, struggling under the unwieldy weight of the motionless Captain Thule.
'Battle-brother, with me!'Apothecary Gordian said to Cirrac, taking to his heels and rushing to intercept Sergeant Aramus.
'Apothecary,' Aramus said as Gordian and Cirrac helped ease Thule from the sergeant's shoulders. 'He's badly wounded, but still lives. He needs immediate assistance.'
Gordian didn't bother telling Aramus that he could see that perfectly well for himself, but motioned to Cirrac to help him carry the captain to the Thunderhawk his battle-brothers guarded.
'We'll get him on board,' Gordian said, 'and then I'll see what needs he has.'
Aramus followed, glancing first at the city behind him, and then to the landing pad.
'Where is the other gunship?' Aramus said, looking from one Thunderhawk to the other.
Gordian glanced back over his shoulder at him impatiently. 'Sergeant Cyrus countermanded the captain's orders. He said he would let the results judge his actions.'
Before Aramus could pose another question, Sergeant Avitus and his Devastator squad pounded onto the ferrocrete behind him.
'That's it, the township is empty,' Avitus said calmly, casually disregarding in his count the thousands upon thousands of refugees still within the city walls. With barely a glance at the others as they loaded the motionless body of Thule onboard, Avitus directed his squad to load up and prepare for lift-off.
THADDEUS AND THE other twelve survivors had fought as long and hard as they were able, and still had only covered a fraction of the distance to the space port. The designated time for lift-off had arrived, and there was no chance that they would reach the extraction point on time.
With the orks pressing in on all sides, Thaddeus had gathered all fourteen of the Blood Ravens under his command into a defensive ring, with the injured Space Marines like Brother Loew placed in the middle, and all those still able to fight standing shoulder to shoulder with their weapons trained outwards.
'Stand fast, men,' Thaddeus ordered. 'Whatever happens here today, your names shall be entered in the Book of Honour, and should we fall, all of us will be remembered in every ringing of the Bell of Souls.'
The orks pressed closer, the feral orks in their barbaric splendour side by side with their better armed and armoured cousins of Gorgrim's horde. Power-claws and explosive-tipped spears, crude swords and flamethrowers, all bore down on the fourteen Space Marines, all eyes filled with the lust for blood and murder in Warlord Gorgrim's name.
Just as the encircling greenskins closed the distance to the ring of defenders, a bolt of blinding blue las-fire lanced down out of the sky and drew a line of screaming death across a dozen or more orks. Before the orks could even look up to the heavens to see whence this burning agony came, a torrent of metal storm frag rounds ripped into the orks on the opposite side of the defenders' ring, the high-explosive charges detonating on impact and sending the deadly fragmentation casings flying out in all directions.
'What the Throne…?' Thaddeus said as he looked up from the carnage wreaked upon the ork attackers, just as a Thunderhawk gunship roared overhead at speed.
'Cyrus to Blood Ravens,' crackled the voice of the pilot over the vox-comms. 'Thought you could use a bit of assistance.'
With the ranks of the orks in disarray, the ring of defenders opened fire, thinning the numbers of enemies around them even further.
'You were not wrong, Sergeant Cyrus,' Thaddeus voxed back with a grin.
'When you failed to reach the space port,' Cyrus replied, 'I decided you might prefer an extraction point a little closer to home.'
'Acknowledged,' Thaddeus said, chuckling. Then, to the Blood Ravens under his command, he added, 'Let's help clear a landing strip, Space Marines, and then we can be up and out of here.'
The gunship roared back for another pass, and though the orks howled in outrage and frustration, they were not prepared for an aerial attack, and were soon set to scatter. It would be a minor victory, but a victory savoured by the Space Marines involved nonetheless.
BY THE TIME Thunderhawk One landed, loaded, and lifted off again, Thunderhawks Two and Three had already blasted up from the Argus space port, with all surviving members of the recruiting party and the Armageddon reinforcements present and accounted for. In all, four full battle-brothers and five neophyte Scouts had been lost in the undertaking, and another half-dozen had received wounds that would not soon heal, Captain Thule chief among them.
As the Thunderhawks rumbled up to escape velocity, towards the strike cruiser Armageddon waiting in orbit, Sergeant Aramus looked at an image of the planet below on a data-slate, taking a last look at the city they'd fought these last days to defend.
With the Blood Ravens gone, nothing remained to prevent the orks, Gorgrim's horde and their feral cousins, from overrunning Argus Township. There were still pockets of resistance and refuge out in the vastness of the deserts, and it would be long months before the orks managed to completely wipe humanity from the face of the planet, but for all intents and purposes Calderis was now lost
to the orks.
'The Emperor protect them,' Aramus said of the humans who remained below, but he harboured little hope that any power, whether on Holy Terra or anywhere else in the universe, would turn an eye towards the last bloody days of Calderis.
Aramus tried to remember the lessons that Sergeant Cyrus had taught them, when he and Thaddeus had been mere neophytes themselves, about the ways a Space Marine must harden his heart against the grim realities of war, and focus only on his duty.
Looking down at Argus Township, unable to avoid picturing the horrors that would soon descend upon the innocents within its crumbling walls, Aramus found it harder and harder to think of anything but the grim realities of war.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DEEP WITHIN THE strike cruiser Armageddon, at its safest, most highly defensible and defended heart, lay the Apothecarion. Here in this vast dimly-lit chamber, in self-locking, sterile tubes, were housed the gene-seed of the Blood Ravens who had fallen during the undertaking on Zalamis. On the Armageddon's return to the fortress-monastery Omnis Arcanum and the rest of the Blood Raven fleet, the tubes would be handed over to the servants of the Chief Apothecary, who would oversee the removal of the progenoid glands from within. These would then be used to create new zygotes, which would allow another generation of Blood Ravens to be initiated. Perhaps even some of the aspirants even now being received onboard by Chaplain Palmarius might survive to have the resultant organs implanted into their bodies, and the gene-seed extracted from the dying bodies of Blood Ravens on distant Zalamis would find new life in aspirants drawn from the desert world of Calderis. Just as the Apothecary's Creed held, ''While his gene-seed returns to the Chapter, a Space Marine cannot die''.
But it was not the broader scope of Space Marines surviving through the inheritance of their gene-seed that now occupied Gordian's attentions, but the more immediate survival of Captain Thule in the here and now. The captain lived, but only just, and unless Gordian wanted to surrender to the inevitable and ready his reductor to begin the extraction process, quick action was required.
With the flip of a switch, Gordian summoned a fleet of medical servitors from their resting places in niches around the circumference of the Apothecarion.
The lead servitor clanked to a stop at Gordian's side, as the Apothecary withdrew his probes from the body of Captain Thule.
'It is time,' Gordian said to the lead servitor. 'Prepare the sarcophagus.'
SERGEANT ARAMUS STOOD on the command deck of the Armageddon, near the captain's chair atop the dais, looking down at the bustle of activity that surrounded him. On all sides Chapter serfs hustled back and forth as servitors buzzed and clicked in their binary speak, preparing the strike cruiser to break orbit and depart the Calderis system. The question still remained as to where they were headed, of course…
'Sir,' one of the Chapter serfs said, approaching with eyes averted. 'The Lord Principal sends his compliments, and requests whether he may yet know our destination and heading.'
Aramus regarded the Chapter serf. He had scarcely noticed the presence of the deck hands in his previous visits to the command deck, and had certainly never been addressed by one. He found it impossible to guess the Chapter serf's age. Half a century? A century? Certainly older than Aramus himself, who hadn't set foot on a space-going vessel before his recruitment into the Blood Ravens, little more than two decades past. This Chapter serf had likely served on the Armageddon longer than Aramus had been alive. It was almost certain that he had served on the command deck as long as Aramus had been a Blood Raven. And yet here Aramus was, in a position to issue commands, which the Chapter serf would follow, or suffer the consequences.
Aramus tried to imagine what his life might have been like, had he failed the examinations or the initiation as a boy, and been taken on by the Blood Ravens as a Chapter serf. Would he be half so loyal, half so proud to serve, if he was denied the opportunity to be an Adeptus Astartes, and was instead relegated to the level of serf?
He didn't know, and likely couldn't know. He learned to love the Chapter and to honour the Emperor through the course of his indoctrination as an initiate and neophyte, and his every view of the universe and of life and duty was coloured by those early lessons. Had he not received that instruction, he would perforce be a different person, and might see the world from a different vantage point.
All of which, of course, was simply a distraction from the present moment. Musing on what might have been, ruminating fruitlessly on the difference between himself and a Chapter serf, imagining how life might have turned out had this event not happened or that event had - all of it was simply a means by which he was distracting himself from the matter at hand, and from the awesome responsibility he suddenly found himself shouldering.
'Inform the Navis dome that we have yet to determine our course,' Sergeant Aramus replied at length, 'and will notify him when the situation changes.'
'Sir,' the Chapter serf answered with a low bow, and then backed away.
With Sergeant Merrik dead on the planet below, and Captain Thule currently out of commission pending Apothecary Gordian's treatment of his injuries, command of the strike cruiser Armageddon fell, per Blood Ravens Chapter protocols, to the ranking tactical squad leader. There being only two tactical squads onboard, the First and the Third - and as the First was at present leaderless, with one of the battle-brothers, Brother Nord, acting as temporary leader only - that meant that the leader of Third Squad would be the new Commander at Sail.
At least until Captain Thule regains consciousness and returns to his post, Sergeant Aramus kept reminding himself.
It wasn't that he hadn't fancied that one day he might progress in the ranks so far as to command such a vessel. But it had been only a short while, in Aramus's estimation, since Captain Thule had first intimated to him on Prosperon that he was on track for a command of his own, and now he suddenly found himself in command of an entire strike cruiser? And, according to protocol, in ultimate command of all of the squads who sailed on board her? A Space Marine less than half his life, and already Aramus held in his hands the lives - and deaths, potentially - of more than three dozen Blood Ravens, including the Scouts in the count. And if one included the dozen aspirants culled from Calderis, or the hundred or so Chapter serfs, or the countless servitors who manned the ship…
Having barely grown accustomed to commanding ten Space Marines, Aramus now found himself with considerably more responsibility.
'Sergeant?'
Aramus turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and found Apothecary Gordian climbing the command dais to join him. 'Yes, Apothecary?' He paused, and then added, unable to mask the tinge of optimism from his voice. 'Have you news of Captain Thule?'
Gordian nodded, slowly, his expression dour. 'There is news, sergeant, but none of it good.'
Aramus took a breath and let out a ragged sigh. 'Are his wounds fatal, then?'
'Yes,' Gordian answered, 'and no. There are any number of lacerations, breakages, and contusions, but most importantly there is a degree of systemic organ failure. In particular, the captain's oolitic kidney has been badly damaged, rendering it incapable of filtering out the tyranid toxins coursing through his body.'
'So the captain will die,' Aramus said, his tone flat and effectless.
'No,' Gordian replied, 'and yes. Were his oolitic kidney functioning, his body might in time recover from its other injuries, but if not, the toxins would kill him in short order. I have placed the captain in a sarcophagus, which will maintain his body in its present state, almost indefinitely.'
'To what end?' Aramus was perplexed. 'Surely his organs won't repair themselves while he is held in suspension?'
Gordian chuckled, the amusement of an expert hearing the uninformed speculation of the layman. 'No, sergeant, surely not. But if I were to be able to purge the toxins from the captain's body first, then it might be possible to repair the oolitic kidney. But in order to purge the toxins, I'd need to devise an effective antitoxin.'
'Then why don't you?' Aramus asked with mounting impatience.
'In order to craft such an antitoxin, I'd need access to a source of pure biotoxin from a tyranid of the same phylum as that which attacked Thule.'
Aramus glanced over at the forward viewports, where the dun-coloured disc of Calderis now turned. 'But there was only one tyranid on the planet, so far as we know. Where would we find another of the same phylum?'
Gordian affected a shrug. 'Perhaps discover whence the tyranid came, and then journey there to find another of the same strain?'
Aramus's eyes narrowed. He recalled what they had learned in the warehouse, and the madness it portended.
The question of their destination was, therefore, decided for him. As was the question of whether he'd be required to continue to act as Commander at Sail. It appeared, despite his hopes to the contrary, that the command was his, after all.
A SHORT WHILE later, Aramus stood on the command deck, awaiting the arrival of the other squad leaders. They were also to be joined by Admiral Forbes of the Imperial Navy's Battlegroup Aurelia, who was compiling an after-action report for her superiors about the events on the planet below, and out of deference to the Blood Ravens Chapter had requested permission to come aboard personally to seek their input rather than delegating the task to a subordinate.
'You wished to see me?' The voice sounded from just behind Aramus, and he turned to find Sergeant Tarkus already climbing the steps onto the command dais.
'Sergeant Tarkus.' Aramus acknowledged his arrival with a nod.
In the recent action on Calderis, Aramus had seen little of Third Squad's second in command, not once he'd divided their numbers to more effectively search Argus Township for recruits. Now, before meeting with the others, he'd summoned Tarkus to join him first, for they had something to discuss.
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