by C Z Dunn
As one, Squad Raphael sense the subtle shift in the tide of the battle and seek cover accordingly. Nine of us make it in time but Regulus goes down hard, a shotgun blast to the knee robbing him of his balance, and as he raises his head to make a retaliatory shot several well-placed autogun rounds take him through the visor of his Mark V helmet, blood gushing from the cracked lens. He relinquishes his grip on his bolter and his prone form is peppered with yet more fire from the cultists, but it is futile. His identifier rune turns from green to red on my display to indicate that Regulus is dead. Another Dark Angel fallen on the field of battle.
For the merest fraction of a second all combat activity ceases. Imperceptible to most but to a veteran Adeptus Astartes sergeant it registers as an age. ‘Avenge him!’ I yell, and my squad lay down a withering barrage of fire before advancing while the cultists cower behind cover, their tactics evolving in light of the apparent skill of their foe.
While no Space Marine actively seeks his own end, the very nature of what we do means that it is always at our shoulder. In the main, we are the dealers of death, our primary purpose to kill and to kill well; but this brings us into contact with others of like mind, though rarely of comparable skill, and although still rare, the demise of a Space Marine is something that occurs with alarming regularity in these dark times. All Space Marines are conditioned to accept death, be it their own or that of a battle-brother, and while Squad Raphael’s reaction to the slaying of one of their own is testimony to the bond between them, it was an unacceptable lapse during the heat of combat. Once we are back on board the Sword of Caliban I will have Interrogator-Chaplain Seraphicus drill them in the Litanies of Woe and Loss and remind them to channel any sense of grief into acts of violence against the foes of the Emperor.
Sensing that their position is about to be overrun, the enemy’s next move is entirely unexpected. Rather than laying down covering fire and retreating, they do the exact opposite and charge towards the onrushing power-armoured figures.
Brother Heskia wheels around with his plasma cannon and sends a gout of white-hot energy in the direction of four enemy combatants, but they are too quick and all Heskia kills is a large patch of undergrowth that smoulders and crackles as the heat vitrifies the scorched earth beneath.
The cultists continue their charge, clubs and knives raised, and Brother Selaphiel opens fire with his bolter. One of them goes down, his left arm shorn off at the shoulder, the stump spurting thick crimson gore, but three of them remain standing and barrel into the Dark Angel, dragging him to the ground and setting about him with their close-combat weapons.
Selaphiel grips one about the throat and chokes the life from him as he pathetically attempts to bludgeon the felled Space Marine, and Master Balthasar disintegrates the skull of another, but the third cultist is able to jam his serrated blade into the soft seal between Selaphiel’s helmet and chestplate. Selaphiel grips the cultist’s hooded face and pushes his fingers through the eye-slit before penetrating the Chaos worshipper’s brain cavity. In one final defiant act, the bare-chested cultist twists the knife a hundred and eighty degrees, a fountain of blood coating his naked torso.
Another identifier rune flashes from green to red.
In the half-century and more that I have served the Dark Angels as a sergeant, I have only ever lost four battle-brothers under my command and in the space of just a few seconds, I have lost half that number again.
No more.
We are Adeptus Astartes with direct lineage to the first founded Legion. We are no mere successor Chapter, nor one raised during later foundings. We are the sons of the Lion and our Chapter bears the same name as his great Legion did throughout the Great Crusade and the black days that followed. We carry his genetic legacy and with it the pride of knowing that we are the Emperor’s finest, first among equals. Two Dark Angels have laid down their lives this day and that is two too many. More blood will be shed before this battle is through but it will be us doing the shedding; more lives will end here upon this distant world but we will be death’s agents.
I will not rest until the enemy is slain and our mission is through, so swears Sergeant Constantin Raphael of the Dark Angels Fifth Company.
Tetchvar,
Cultist Leader
Dark Angels. The irony is so palpable I can practically taste it.
It was them, they made me like this. Not literally, of course, I have my new masters to thank for my ‘enhancements’, but had it not been for the inaction of the Dark Angels then I wouldn’t be here today.
It was fifteen standard Terran years ago. Or was it twenty? Warp travel wreaks havoc with time perception. Regardless, I’d just finished campaigning against the greenskins in the Khapanesk Junction where I’d been responsible for the discipline of three entire regiments of Golmeynian Equinaars – bloody savages to a man but the finest beast riders I’d ever seen – when the order came down from Segmentum command that I was to ship out to somewhere called the Procel system and hook up with a newly founded regiment who were the only thing standing in the way of a full-blown arch-enemy invasion of almost a dozen worlds.
I had been expecting the worst. A freshly raised regiment made up of gas miners, petty bureaucrats and boy soldiers was far from ideal in the face of what the enemy were throwing against us but they applied themselves well and, having endured centuries of raids by ork and eldar pirates, their cities and settlements were well defended.
A little too well defended, as it happened.
As the Chaos advance stalled all across the system, more and more forces poured in on both sides and the campaign became bogged down. Siege situations arose in all of the major population centres and on the distant gas-mining moon where my regiment was stationed, it was no different. With enemy ships blockading the moon, ground forces were able to encircle us. The mining fort we’d chosen to hole up in because of its easily defensible position high upon the ridge of a crater soon became our prison, and very nearly became our tomb.
The first few months were comparatively easy. Blasting us from orbit was out of the question as the vast gas deposits on which we sat would cause a nova that would wipe out any ships within several parsecs. And besides, it was the gas deposits the Chaos forces were interested in, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered with a moon lying so far out from the core worlds of the system. Our high vantage point meant it was impossible for the enemy to move artillery close enough to bombard us and any foot assault was slow and laboured thanks to the steep incline of the slope heading up towards the fortress. Anti-personnel mines and heavy bolter batteries soon dealt with anybody who got too close to our position. During the first seven months of the siege, we lost only two of the Procel troops and both of those were down to mine-laying accidents.
And that was part of the problem.
The remote mining fortresses of the Procel system were not only designed to withstand marauding pirates and, as we were discovering, the attentions of an invading Chaos force, but also to be entirely self-sufficient for extended periods of time. Power generation was a formality thanks to the gas reserves and advanced purification systems meant we never ran short of clean water, but food? That was a different matter entirely.
Under normal circumstances, a mining fortress would comfortably accommodate around a thousand miners and associated support staff for two years before it needed resupplying. In the event that the resupply was delayed, there was an additional store of a year’s worth of emergency rations in a vault below the fortress. Because there were upwards of five thousand men currently calling the facility home, even with strict rationing the emergency supplies were almost exhausted by the end of the first year.
In a standard siege situation, a form of bizarre natural selection comes into play whereby the smaller the ration supply gets the longer it seems to last thanks to the population dwindling due to disease contracted from dirty drinking water and casualties from the conflict. With neither
factor contributing to thin our numbers we still had almost as many mouths to feed as the day that we first locked the gates of the fortress. The enemy’s strategy was now plain for us all to see: they were simply going to starve us out and march boldly into the fortress once we were all dead.
But they weren’t finished with us just yet.
At night, when we fought to sleep through the pain in our bellies due to the hunger, they whispered to us in our nightmares. They made promises to us that we would come to no harm, that if we opened the gates and let them in then they would give us a ship and grant us safe passage away from the moon. They showed us other things, too. The rewards that would be ours if we took up arms against our comrades and threw in our lot with them, not just let them have what they sought but took an active role in obtaining it for them. Power. Glory. Life.
It’s another irony of my life that by sending us those dreams they made our food supply last that little bit longer. Knowing that some of the Procel troops would be tempted, myself and the commissar cadets under my command took to sleeping by the main gate. In the week following the first of the dreams, the population of the mining fortress dropped by almost two hundred. But the dreams were unrelenting.
Whether it was because the enemy knew I was in charge of the defence or for some other unfathomable reason, my nightmares were the worst. They showed me at the head of an enemy force leading vast armies across Imperial worlds, laying waste to all before me while my power grew. In the dreams I was me, but also more than me. My face still looked the same but altered somehow, my visage more terrifying, and my hair was white, like an albino’s. Every night for a month the enemy sent these images into my dreams and every night for a month I woke the next morning in a cold sweat.
The first inkling I had that the dreams were having an effect on me was when I no longer felt any revulsion at consuming human flesh.
At first, the summary executions were a deterrent – a warning to others not to heed the voices in their dreams – but then, with the food supply rapidly dwindling, one of the commissar cadets was caught roasting the cadaver of one of the deserters. I executed him on the spot, naturally, but the looks in the eyes of the other cadets and the conscripted men told me that all of them would have done the same. I had to reassert my authority, had to maintain control of the situation so that the men didn’t mutiny and let the enemy at the gates into the fortress. Word had reached us over the long-range vox that the Dark Angels Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes had entered the Procel system and even now were liberating worlds one at a time. If only we could hold out for a while longer then we would be saved. I decreed that from that point forwards, starting with the cadet I’d just shot through the back of the head, any man caught trying to open the gates would not only be killed but his body consumed so that those he was attempting to betray might yet live. Only a dozen more men tried to desert before the message got through.
With our new food supply curtailed, I imposed stricter rules within the fortress, making many more infractions punishable by death. One man was executed for leaving a window ajar after smoking a lho-stick in his bunk room, another for reporting for duty with bloodstains on his tunic. Eventually the cadets and I were looking for any excuse to add another body to the morgue and the only thing preventing the enlisted men from mutinying was that they knew that by doing this we were ensuring they were fed to survive another day.
Over time, my nightmares got worse. In one recurring dream, I was at the head of a banquet held by the besieging forces in my honour but on every platter at the table was the charred corpse of a Procel trooper or commissar cadet. In another, the mining fortress was ablaze and I watched, laughing, as men roasted on spits while a voice whispered to me, ‘You’ve broken the last taboo. Join us. Join us.’
In the end, there was only one recurring nightmare. In it, the cadets had turned on me and, while I was still alive and fully aware of what was happening to me, they feasted on my flesh and entrails, gorging themselves while the conscripted men looked on hungrily, waiting for their turn at the table.
Upon awakening on the third consecutive night of experiencing this dream I received a message over the long-range vox that the Dark Angels had ceased operations in the Procel system after liberating the core worlds and had moved on to their next theatre of war. Returning to the gatehouse, I murdered the cadets in their sleep and let the enemy in.
The slaughter that followed made the cannibalism I’d endured look like playground games. Whereas we had killed for survival, the enemy – who were not my enemy now – killed for fun. They could have made good on their whispered promises to set us free, given us a ship and safe passage, but instead they chose to punish us for our defiance, even though it was the path of most resistance. Men, still-living men, were hung from barbs and hooks on the walls and left to bleed out slowly, a long agonising death as opposed to the swift killings I had meted out. The halls of the fortress were filled with the death cries of conscripted men and their symphony of barbarism accompanied me as I was brought before the enemy leader.
A brute of a man – though he had long since ceased being a man in the true sense of the word – the Chaos Space Marine I was forced to kneel before was even larger than the greenskins I had faced at Khapanesk. He told me of his surprise that it was a commissar who had been the one to relent and open the gates, that the very symbol of loyalty to the Imperium would turn betrayer.
‘The Imperium betrayed me first,’ I spat.
This pleased him and I genuinely believe that single comment saved my life.
‘Well, commissar,’ he said, grinning. ‘It’s time you received the reward you were promised.’
I was taken on board one of the enemy vessels – though, of course, by now they were no longer my enemy – and placed in a hold amongst the cultists and mutants that made up the bulk of their forces. That first night two attempts were made on my life, my new master finding it amusing to stitch my commissar’s storm coat to my flesh in such a manner that removing it would cause me to bleed to death. Its continued presence marks me as a target for the degenerates I would now fight alongside.
As time passed, the murder bids ceased as the hand-to-hand combat skills I had picked up from the Golmeynians allowed me to work my way up through the hierarchy below decks and, by the first time we made planetfall, I had not only acquired a weapon but also a small warband of well-armed cultists.
Emerging into torrential rain from the rear hatch of the troop lander onto the nameless Imperial world which I was to help to lay waste, another of my life’s ironies occurred to me: I had gone from being a paragon of discipline to a disciple of Chaos. Smiling, I looked down at my reflection in a puddle. My face still looked the same but altered somehow, my visage more terrifying, and my hair was white, like an albino’s.
Smiling again, I led my men towards the enemy to kill for my new masters.
Battle-Brother Heskia
My brothers will not die in vain this day. Their sacrifice will be remembered, their glories recorded in the annals of our Chapter, because there but for the grace of the Lion and the Emperor go I.
It was my failure that caused Selaphiel’s death, my inability to hit the target that allowed the cultists to reach him, and for that I must atone. Though his killers lie dead there are still more enemies on this field of battle and it is my sacred duty to Emperor and primarch and my honour duty to my fallen battle-brother to ensure that none shall live to see another sunrise.
The heat of the plasma cannon feels reassuring against my body, the whine of the weapon spooling up a glorious overture with which to strike fear into the hearts of the enemies of the Imperium. The weapon’s song reaches its crescendo and a chorus of searing plasma bursts forth, two more cultists claimed in balance against the souls of my fallen brothers. The enemy rout and scatter through the undergrowth towards a clearing up ahead. Squad Raphael make to give chase, to finish what we’ve started, but Mas
ter Balthasar stays our hand.
‘Regroup and advance on me, attack formation Nemiel minus two,’ the Master’s voice crackles over the vox-link. ‘Arion reported a potential Traitor Astartes presence and I do not want us stumbling blindly into another ambush.’
My hearts sink upon hearing the order. Attack formation Nemiel is a long-established combat formation with two staggered ranks providing maximum visibility and firing opportunities, though it is best employed by a full tactical squad of ten Space Marines. The minus two is a stark reminder of the losses the enemy has already inflicted upon us. Though it sits ill with me leaving their bodies behind, I know we will be back later to recover their gene-seed. Though their war is over, their legacy shall live on in the next generation of Dark Angels.
Without giving it further thought, I fall into formation behind Master Balthasar along with the other survivors of Squad Raphael and, augmented by my power armour, set off at a sprint through the undergrowth.
We pause upon reaching the edge of the clearing. It is empty save for a slow-moving cultist who is dragging his wounded left leg as he attempts to reach the other side. Brother Simiel raises his bolter to take aim but Sergeant Raphael places his hand on top of the barrel and gently lowers the weapon. The sergeant motions to the blood trail the cultist is leaving and Simiel nods his understanding.
The Master’s voice breaks across the vox-link once more. ‘Brothers Heskia and Orion, perhaps you would be so kind as to lead the way. After all, you have more recent memories of being members of the Scout Company than the rest of us.’
If the comment had been made between two Imperial Guardsmen, or even battle-brothers of a less disciplined Chapter, then it would likely have been made with malice or humour behind it but, coming as it did from the Company Master of the Dark Angels Fifth Company, it was instead born of pragmatism. We have a mission to complete, fallen brothers to avenge, and even though we are several years out of the Scout Company, Orion and I remember it as if it were only yesterday.