What are you?
The question was the faint but clear toll of iron on iron. The refrain had been repeated so many times, metal folded over itself again and again, hammered and hammered until it had a new unity of strength, a new identity. The question resounded with Ba’birin’s voice as though he were asking it for the first time, and it demanded an answer.
What are you?
I am Techmarine.
I am Salamander.
I am Ha’garen.
I am losing my soul.
He pulled out. The reality of the hold grasped him as he yanked his mechadendrites from the generator. He staggered, the ork taint leaving his self with reluctance. He felt shredded and hollowed out. He looked to his left and saw the Overfiend stride past Ba’birin’s crumpled figure. The monster was coming to collect his prize.
The Overfiend paused. His expression changed from snarling omnipotence to enraged panic. As the ship powered away from the planet on the course Ha’garen had commanded, what had entered the orks now left, its reach overextended. Ha’garen saw the Overfiend wither before him, diminishing from god to mere monster. The hold echoed with the howl of despairing orks. The Overfiend’s armour, lacking the power assist of its pistons, turned into a prison. The ork was wearing a tonne of inert iron. He toppled forwards with a booming crash.
They stared at each other for a moment, the fallen ork warlord and the Space Marine who stood only because he didn’t attempt to walk. The Overfiend glared at Ha’garen with the fury of thwarted destiny. Ha’garen tried to raise a weapon, but his limbs and will were weak and drained. His servo-arms hung as motionless.
Bolter-fire hammered into the Overfiend’s armour as the other Salamanders came down the hill. Their aim was thrown as a massive seizure shook the deck and the walls of the hold. The kroozer was rocked by the cannons of its own fleet. The Overfiend found the strength of desperation and struggled free of his armour. As he rose, a shell struck him in the shoulder. Instead of dropping him, it spurred him. The beast, still a gigantic monument of violence, but now raging impotence, tore past Ha’garen in a limping sprint and disappeared into the gloom of the hold.
The kroozer shook again, the battering even more insistent. The deck heaved. Towers of pointless mechanism collapsed. Even blessedly severed from his link to the ship, Ha’garen could feel it begin to die. The orks that had been charging to the aid of their ruler had lost all discipline. They were disappearing from the field of battle as quickly as they had arrived. They were routed, panicked, fleeing the destruction of their vessel.
Ha’garen took his first step as his battle-brothers rejoined him. ‘Ba’birin,’ he began.
‘He will live on,’ N’krumor said.
Ha’garen nodded. So the harvest of Ba’birin’s progenoid glands was complete.
More explosions. Somewhere in the distance, there was the ominous sound of wind. The hull had been breached. Berengus said, ‘Contact from the Verdict of the Anvil. A Thunderhawk is on its way. It needs a location.’
The kroozer’s every bolt was clear in Ha’garen’s mind. He knew the ship as he knew the Verdict. He set aside thoughts of being tainted and said, ‘There is a loading bay close at hand. One deck up.’ He gave Berengus the coordinates to pass on to the Thunderhawk.
Prisoner in tow, the Salamanders plunged through the maelstrom of the agonised ship. It was as if the madness of the hold had spread throughout the hull. Corridors fell into pits of fire. Walls twisted under terminal strain and heat. Smoke choked the passageways. The light was the light of ending, flickering red and shrieking white. And filling the air was the song of a ship breaking up: a hellish choir of screaming metal punctuated by the deep, internal, fatal arrhythmia of explosions. Ha’garen led the way. There were no secrets in the iron warren any more, and he countered every blocked path with an alternative route. There was no hesitation, no delay. He had been shaped into the necessary weapon for this war, and he used the xenos knowledge to guide his brothers out of the kroozer as it succumbed to the purity of flame.
The docking bay was in the grip of a hurricane. The Thunderhawk Mount Deathfire had blasted its way into the bay, and the kroozer’s atmosphere was pouring itself into the void. Elisath collapsed, gasping for air. Ha’garen carried him the rest of the way to the gunship.
As the Mount Deathfire pulled away from the kroozer, Ha’garen watched through a viewing block as the ork flagship underwent its death throes. By this point, it was no longer taking fire, and its own guns had fallen silent. Its engines were dark. It drifted now, its frame pulsing with the bursts of the fires that raced down its arteries. Those would fade, too, as the air finished venting from the dozens of breaches. It did not die with fury and glory. It burned to an ember, a broken shell. It would soon be a husk, a broken tombstone to its master’s ambition.
Neleus emerged from the cockpit. He had removed his helmet, and his face was lined with exhaustion, less from the loss of his arm than from the toll of the fallen. ‘Word from our captain,’ he announced. ‘The ork fleet, what is left of it, is in full retreat.’
‘Then the Overfiend is dead?’ N’krumor asked.
‘No,’ Ha’garen put in. ‘A retreat means they stopped fighting each other. Someone imposed order. They still have their leader.’
‘Many small craft were seen escaping the kroozer,’ Neleus said. ‘But if he lives, his designs on this system have been crippled.’ He turned his head to look at the prisoner. ‘And we will destroy what was calling to the greenskins.’
Elisath said nothing. Ha’garen glanced at the eldar, and saw a being who had little to benefit from in his change of captors. He turned his attention back to the viewing block. The ork ship was going dark, disappearing into the night of the void. He was catching his last sight of Ba’birin’s grave.
He asked the question on his brother’s behalf. What am I? He knew the answer, for now, but he also knew that answer would continue to change. He had been able to kill the ship because of how much of the flesh and of the human he had surrendered. Remember the human, Ba’birin had said. So he would, but one could only remember what one no longer possessed. The path of this destiny was clear. He must transform. Contact with the kroozer had left him with a spiritual cancer. He felt it gnawing, and must burn it away. He must throw himself into the forge until he became the most perfect weapon in the service of his Chapter and his Emperor. Before the process was done, what had once been Ha’garen would be as dead as his brother.
But they would both be remembered.
Epilogue
Beneath the surface of Lepidus Prime, beneath the human city built on eldar ruins, Elisath stood before the entrance to the labyrinth. Above, in the city and in the land to the east, his kin lay in charred, blackened fragments. Their jetbikes, the emblem of the Saim-Hann way of war, were twisted, ruined mockeries of themselves. Behind him, the warriors of the human Emperor stood waiting, as monstrous and beyond entreaty as the orks.
No runes, but the future held no mystery. Now and forever, he was damned and lost.
‘Take us to it,’ the captain of the Salamanders ordered.
He could refuse, and rush to torture, or to the eternal embrace of She Who Thirsts. Or he could walk, and in the time he gained during the slow journey to the shard, he could pray. Pray to the splintered god. Pray that he was not the only eldar still living on this planet. Pray for a miracle. Pray for vengeance.
He began to walk.
About The Author
David Annandale is the author of the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novel Imperial Creed, as well as the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. For the Space Marine Battles series he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. David lectures at a Canadian un
iversity, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.
For Margaux, for all Chapters, past, present and to come.
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