by Ben Counter
When it died down, there was a hole in front of Hamander where a couple of his Imperial Fists had stood. They were gone, vaporised.
On a column of flame and shuddering haze rose a beast three times the height of a man, seemingly clad in molten armour that hissed and spat as it burned. It wore a crown of twisted bone and one of its hands was a bloody steel gauntlet, shedding an endless torrent of gore. In its other it carried an enormous sword, glowing with power that issued from the alien runes inscribed on its blade.
The terrible shrieking that issued from it was almost deafening.
‘Their god!’ yelled Techmarine Machaon over the noise. ‘Summoned to war! Witchcraft, brothers! Alien witchcraft!’
The Imperial Fists had recovered quickly from the shock of the demigod’s appearance. Bolter fire smacked into its molten hide, seemingly making no impact at all. It turned its burning green eyes from one Space Marine to the next, and if Hamander could read anything from its inhuman face it was scorn and anger.
‘You shall not take the standard!’ yelled Hamander, barely able to hear his own voice. ‘Not while one yet lives!’
The demigod thrust its sword down and Hamander rolled to the side, catching the end of its blade under the head of his power axe. Sparks flew as the axe’s power field fought against the energy of the sword. The demigod was strong, monstrously so, and Hamander felt himself being forced back.
‘When your kind have been forgotten,’ snarled Hamander, ‘they will remember us! They will remember this, when all who knew of you are rumours and dust!’
More aliens were storming into the upper floors. Some had chainblades and heavier armour, plated emerald green. Others, in black and purple, walked slowly through the fires to bring their rocket launchers to bear. The Imperial Fists who remained yelled their war-cries and ran into the fray, bolter fire streaking everywhere.
The demigod lunged forwards and threw Hamander onto his back. Its blade came down like a guillotine, reflecting the flames and the sight of his brothers dying.
‘You have seen,’ said Lysander, ‘the Standard of the Seventh. You have heard the name of Captain Hamander of the Seventh Company, and looked on his image, carved in granite, looking down as you knelt in his chapel. What was it worth to put that standard in such a place of honour? To put Hamander’s name among those of our greatest heroes? If you knew you could buy that for yourselves, for the honour of your Chapter and the glory of your Primarch, how much would you spend to get it?’
None of the novices answered.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘You would charge into hell if I demanded it. You would grapple with the alien and lock horns with the daemon. Yet you will not answer a mere question? Apeyo! How much?’
‘The life of any battle-brother who would stand with me,’ replied Apeyo. ‘If they wished to put themselves on the line for such glory, I would not hinder them.’
‘And your own life?’ said Lysander.
‘Of course,’ said Apeyo. ‘My life for the glory of Dorn.’
‘Your life,’ said Lysander. ‘A life selected from a pool of millions of supplicants. Crafted in the image of Dorn, some say crafted from the very flesh of the Emperor Himself. Armed with the best battlegear. Transported on the best spacecraft. The recipient of resources that the Imperium can ill afford to muster, a life owed to the labour of a trillion men to make the existence of the Space Marines possible. This you would spend to purchase something as meaningless as glory?’
‘I do not believe that glory is meaningless, captain,’ replied Apeyo.
‘But compared to the life of an Imperial Fist?’ said Lysander. ‘How much weight does glory have, placed on the balance beside such a life?’ He turned to the other novices. ‘Answers!’ he barked.
‘None,’ said Kogen.
‘Then Hamander was wrong?’ said Lysander.
‘Yes, he was.’
‘This hero before whose statue you have knelt? This man whose battles and lessons have been taught to every novice since his death? He was wrong?’
Kogen could not answer. Lysander walked up to him, looming down over the novice.
‘Tell me,’ said Lysander, ‘that Captain Hamander made the wrong choice. Before me, before your brothers, tell me that.’
Kogen stayed silent. His eyes flickered to the faces of the novices beside him.
‘And if you cannot say it,’ continued Lysander, ‘then say that, too.’
‘I cannot, captain,’ said Kogen.
‘Good,’ said Lysander. ‘The force returned some days later to find the two survivors of the mission to recover the standard. Hamander was not one of them. He died at Manufactorum Sigma. Were it not for his actions, the standard would surely have been lost and a great shame brought upon the Imperial Fists. And yet, twenty Space Marines died for this. For silk and stitching.’
Lysander dismissed the holo-projection with a wave of his hand and the war archive reverted to its normal half-gloom. He walked between the rows of novices – they were already beginning the augmentation of their skeletal and muscular systems, but even so he towered over them. They did not shy away from him. That was good. The cowardice of a normal man was being hammered out of them. A decent proportion of them would receive the armour of a Scout, and of those, many would take on the armour of a full battle-brother. They were not ready yet, of course. Perhaps they never would be, until they wore the black fist of the Chapter in anger before the enemy.
‘One final question,’ he said. He took from an ammo pouch at his waist a single bolter shell. It was inscribed with the initials ‘IRIXA’, inlaid with gold filigree and studded with emeralds. It had been drilled and threaded onto a thin chain, to be worn as a talisman. ‘What do you see?’
He held the bolter shell up. The novices watched but there was no recognition on their faces.
‘Imperator Rex In Xanatar Aeternam,’ said Lysander. ‘What do those words mean to you?’
‘Xanatar is a world on the Eastern Rim,’ said Novice Lukra, a short, stocky lad with huge meaty hands and a square reddish face.
‘And what of Xanatar?’ asked Lysander.
‘I know no more about it, captain,’ said Lukra. ‘Such is my shame.’
‘You want me to tell you what punishment you are to administer to yourself for your ignorance,’ said Lysander, ‘and then explain to all of you what you do not know. There will be no session in the nerve-glove, Novice Lukra. None of you have been told of Xanatar. That is because this bolter shell was one of a hundred created in the forges of the Phalanx for Chaplain Belisar four hundred years ago. If you know of Belisar it is only as one of thousands of names on the rolls of honour, perhaps an inscription on the wall of the Reclusiam. He is not commemorated as a hero here, or recorded as a strategist in our histories. None teach of him at all, save I. I show you this because once, like Siculus and Hamander, Belisar had to make a choice.’
The storms of Xanatar had killed civilisations before, rising up from the flint deserts in blizzards of razor-sharp stone. Every few centuries they would rise, occasionally striking a few decades apart or waiting for millennia, but they always returned and they always wiped out whatever hopeful young culture had sprung up on the rich volcanic slopes of the lava rivers.
They had stripped the Imperial colony of Port Xan of everything above ground. Of those caught in the open, not even bones remained. It had happened three weeks ago and the flurries of stone were still lashing against the chewed foundations. The small population were sheltering in the hazard bunkers underground, or huddled in twos and threes in the basements and storage cellars where they had fled to when the sky first turned dark.
Through the brown-black blur of the storm, the dark red glow of the nearest lava river cast a blood-coloured light. It was a tributary of one of the greater volcanic flows. Xanatar’s volcanoes placed a constantly renewed layer of nutrient minerals on the planet’s surface, making it extremely fertile and a coveted location for conversion by the Administratum into an agri-world to feed t
he young worlds of the Eastern Rim. And it would be a hugely productive world again, until the next storm came.
Chaplain Belisar walked against the storm, the weight of his Terminator armour alone keeping him on his feet. The black paint on its leading surfaces had been scraped off by the hail of flint, revealing the dull gunmetal of the ceramite underneath. The auto-senses built into the skull-faced helmet struggled to make anything of the storm save for a seething darkness and the deep red ribbon of the lava river up ahead.
Belisar forced his eyes to focus and could just see the shattered foundations of Port Xan nearby. He was in the middle of the settlement, what remained of it. The remains of the tallest structure barely came up to his shin. He tried to find movement in the darkness that was not a part of the storm’s chaos.
A shadow moved against a shadow. Belisar drew his storm bolter, bracing his wrist to hold its twin barrels level against the stone wind.
‘Ill met,’ said Belisar on a broad-channel vox-broadcast. ‘But met as a brother, nonetheless.’
From the darkness coalesced the shape of a Space Marine. In the light his Terminator armour would have been an iridescent black, like the carapace of a beetle. The emblem of a golden fist gripping a hammer was inscribed on his chestplate and the same symbol was sculpted in deep relief on one shoulder pad. Mounted in the Space Marine’s golden helmet were a pair of similarly coloured sensor lenses in which Belisar could see his own reflection. On one knee guard was a campaign badge depicting a storm cloud and lightning bolt, demonstrating that this battle-brother had fought in the crusades among the Imperium’s eastern reaches over the last decade.
‘Chaplain,’ said the Space Marine. The vox-net was distorted but audible. ‘I guessed that they would send you.’
‘At the Feast of Blades when we last met,’ said Belisar, ‘you defeated me and won the laurels for your Chapter. You conducted yourself as an honourable brother in all things. That is why I know you are not what some say you are.’
‘And what,’ came the reply, ‘do they say of us?’
‘That you are traitors,’ replied Belisar. ‘But I know that you are no traitor, Tek’Shal.’
Tek’Shal walked a few paces closer. His marks of rank were visible now. He had a veteran sergeant’s chevrons on the body of the boltgun hanging at his side. Acts of leadership were commemorated by the gilded crux terminatus and winged bolter shell hanging from the brocade across his chest. One greave was carved with the pattern of a spider’s web, with purity seals pinned to it like trapped prey.
‘Because I am a son of Rogal Dorn?’ said Tek’Shal.
‘Because I learn a great deal about those I fight. It is a Chaplain’s role to do so. I know you, Tek’Shal, better than you realise.’
‘So you think you can convince us to kneel as inferiors?’
‘Not kneel,’ said Belisar. ‘No one is asking for your obeisance. Just to take a step back from this path. It is not too late to choose a new one. Step away from it, leave Xanatar and the Eastern Reaches – not for good, just to demonstrate you have no designs upon it yourself. The Imperial Fists have great influence among the Imperium’s military, we will see to it that there are no repercussions. I swear this as a brother.’
‘You cannot swear that,’ said Tek’Shal. ‘Not when you will strip from us all we have earned.’
‘This world means so much to you?’ said Belisar, holding his arms wide to indicate the tortured landscape around them both. ‘This is worth abandoning the Imperium for?’
‘Xanatar is where it starts,’ came the reply. We have laboured years among these stars, fighting the Emperor’s fight, unheralded and unthanked. Not for us the honours of Terra, the fame of Dorn’s favourite sons! These hands that have taken a thousand lives have laid a hundred brothers to rest. All we ask is to keep what we have earned! The worlds of this subsector, in recompense for the war we fought and won here. Is this not what the lowest Imperial Guard regiment is offered – the right of settlement in conquered territory, in recognition of their sacrifice? Thus we claimed Xanatar, the first world in our dominion. Thus we will take what we are owed, nothing more.’
‘We are Space Marines!’ said Belisar. ‘We exist to fight the Emperor’s war. We do not need the power over a world to motivate us to our duty. Where did you learn that you fight for reward? Our duty is its own reward, to see it done or die in the attempt. It is not the place of a Space Marine to seek to rule what he conquers. It is his place to win it back and defend it for the dominion of the Emperor, not his own.’
‘And what of the Ultramarines?’ retorted Tek’Shal. ‘They rule their own empire, do they not?’
‘That is different, brother. You know that.’
‘Is it, Chaplain? Why? Because the Ultramarines have the most glorious of histories, because their word is heard when ours is ignored?’
‘Because the Emperor granted that dominion to Roboute Guilliman! He who does not walk among us cannot cede the worlds of His Imperium to you!’
‘Then what He cannot give us,’ said Tek’Shal, jabbing a finger towards Belisar, ‘we will take!’
‘I see,’ said Belisar. ‘You are certain in the principles of what you do. I must respect that. But the consequences are another matter.’
‘Ah, the consequences!’ replied Tek’Shal. ‘And tell me, what will they be? The Lords Militant will declare us Excommunicate, perhaps? A Naval fleet will appear in a few years’ time to bring us to justice. Every line of ours they cross, we will be waiting. We will storm them and cripple them, one by one, just as we did the xenos and the traitor who once held these stars! Do not speak of consequences, Chaplain Belisar of the Imperial Fists. Those who fight us will feel the consequences of denying us what is ours by right.’
‘No,’ said Belisar. ‘Those are not the consequences of which I speak.’
‘The Imperial Guard, then? A million men sent to drive us out world by world? They will never bring us to battle. As Dorn once taught his scouting corps, we will melt away and emerge again in twos and threes to kill a dozen men and vanish. Every force landed against us will be picked apart and bled white. The lifeless husks of armies will litter these worlds. You know this to be true, Belisar. You know how we fight.’
‘Again,’ said Belisar calmly. ‘That is not the consequence you face.’
Belisar took a single bolter shell from the ammunition pouches around his waist. He held up the shell so Tek’Shal could see it. It was intricately inscribed, and among the scrollwork were the letters ‘IRIXA’.
‘Imperator Rex In Xanatar Aeternam,’ he said. ‘The Emperor Reigns on Xanatar for All Time. Lowly as this world is, it is the Emperor’s. The bleakest rock is His, and it is our duty to keep it His. I came here willing to kill you, Tek’Shal, because my duty to the Emperor and His Imperium is greater than the bond of brotherhood between us.’ Belisar put the shell into the chamber of the storm bolter. ‘I knew that you were a man of honour. But I am not. I will shoot you down here, though you are without a weapon in your hand. I will put you down, be you a fellow son of Dorn or no.’
Tek’Shal could have gone for his own bolter, hanging at his side. But the storm bolter was aimed right at his head, and he could not have drawn his weapon before Belisar’s finger pulled the trigger. The Terminator’s hand did not move.
Belisar sensed that Tek’Shal was smiling beneath the many-eyed faceplate of his helmet. ‘I am not alone on this world,’ said Tek’Shal. ‘What will you do when I am dead?’
‘I forged a hundred bolter shells for Xanatar,’ replied Belisar coolly. ‘When I have killed you, I will have ninety-nine left. How many of your brothers will I kill before they overcome me? I am a Reclusiarch of the Imperial Fists. I have faced members of the Traitor Legions, and unlike any of your men I have killed a Space Marine before. So, how many will I kill? And when I am done, how great a will do you think the Venom Thorns will still have to rule their own empire?’
‘We will weave the web around you, strangle you like prey,�
� said Tek’Shal. There was steel in his voice now.
‘Khorhadek, captain of the Skulltakers, took an oath to kill me and give my head to his god,’ replied Belisar. ‘But it was his skull that became the trophy, for I placed it on the Altar of Brotherhood on the Phalanx.’ Belisar kept the storm bolter levelled at Tek-Shal’s face. ‘I will break out of your web as I broke out of his, and stalk you through this storm like the Emperor’s own ghost. All of this will happen unless you leave Xanatar and every other world in this sector to the rightful rule of the Emperor.’
‘You will not kill a Space Marine,’ said Tek’Shal. ‘And we will not give up our right to rule what we have conquered.’
The storm bolter did not waver.
‘I fought you, too, remember,’ continued Tek’Shal. ‘And the man I fought was not one who could kill a battle-brother in cold blood. Chaplain or no, you are a Space Marine. This is not a choice you can make.’
Belisar did not move. Neither did Tek’Shal.
The storm screeched across Xanatar, so dense that it seemed to hide everything on its surface from even the Emperor’s eyes.
‘What did he choose?’ asked Novice Arnobius. The novice’s eyes were still on the bolter shell dangling on its chain.
‘What,’ said Lysander, ‘do you think?’
‘Tek’Shal was a renegade,’ replied Arnobius. ‘A Chaplain would have no choice but to…’
‘To kill another son of Dorn?’ interrupted Lukra. ‘Can any Space Marine do so? Not in combat, in battle, but as an execution?’
‘Then you think, Novice Lukra,’ said Lysander, ‘that Belisar should have let Tek’Shal rebel against the Emperor’s rule?’
‘I think he would not have,’ said Lukra. ‘But as to whether he should have? I think that is another question I cannot answer, captain.’
‘That is because you are a novice, Lukra,’ said Lysander. ‘Because no such choice has been demanded of you. But one day, it will. This I swear. No one who fights in the Emperor’s name can ever do so without making decisions that cost lives, or determine the honour given to the Chapter and to the Emperor, or which can force us against every principle we have devoted our lives to upholding. To answer your question, Novice Arnobius, Belisar left Xanatar alive. That is all anyone knows of the matter. What he did, what befell Tek’Shal and his Chapter, Chapter records do not show. They have been lost to the ages. Nothing but a trace of the incident remains, and that was only recently discovered in thePhalanx’s archives.’ Lysander coiled the chain around the bolter shell and put it away again. ‘I can preach no lesson from Chaplain Belisar’s example. You must draw your own lesson. You must make your own choice.’