by Various
The two warriors could not have been less alike. His armour draped in scrolls of his deeds, bone tokens of fallen foes, and the skulls of seven orks hanging from his chain bandolier, Imrich was a whirlwind of movement. Kicks, punches, elbow thrusts, headbutts – all thrown into a duel with shortswords, added between the moves of the clashing blades.
Opposing him was Toma, embodying pure economy of motion. Where Imrich’s fury twinned with his skill, Toma’s movements were calculated to the finest degree by a lightning mind that drove his vicious combat reflexes. His blade snapped into position to block and thrust in a silver blur, stopping precisely at each twist, never overbalancing, never overreaching, with Toma never giving ground.
‘I’ll wear you down, Deathwatch,’ Imrich teased. Their gladius blades locked again, and the two helms glared at each other only half a metre apart.
Toma said nothing. Displayed on the polished iron of his unique shoulder pad was the stylised symbol of the Holy Inquisition. He always fought in silence. His recent return from three years in the specialist Ordo Xenos Deathwatch Chapter hadn’t changed that.
The fight came to an end when Argo cleared his throat. Disengaging from one another, Imrich and Toma resheathed their blades.
‘I had you, Deathwatch.’ Imrich saluted his opponent with his clenched left fist against his heart.
‘Sure you did, hero.’ Toma’s voice was toneless as he returned the gesture.
‘I had you.’
‘The day you have me is the day the Emperor rises from the Throne and dances all night long.’
Brother-Sergeant Demetrian silenced them both with a fist pounded against the metal wall.
‘News, Brother-Chaplain?’ the sergeant asked.
Argo removed his helm and gave them his half-smile. ‘They think we’re here in answer of a distress call.’
The squad looked at the Chaplain, awaiting further explanation. Now this had their interest up.
‘You didn’t tell them the truth,’ said Demetrian. The veteran’s scarred face was a map of battles fought across a hundred systems. Both his gauntlets were crimson; he’d served time in the Crusade Company among the best of the best, and on the knee of his armour, a Black Templar cross was proudly displayed. The Declates Crusade, when the Templars and the Fists broke ranks to fight in mixed units, was a point of great honour for both Chapters. Demetrian had been there. A roll of his honours was recorded in acid-etched lettering on a gold tablet in the Chapter’s fortress-monastery back home on Rynn’s World.
Argo nodded. ‘I thought it best to retain the illusion of our compliance. The truth would breed animosity.’
‘No surprise,’ Demetrian’s words were as clipped and to the point as ever. ‘The plan remains the same?’
‘We fight until the Cantorial Palace. Then we do the duty entrusted to us. I saw the maps of Southspire and the enemy’s forces spread across the sector. A new warlord leads the enemy on the far side of the city, and the Guard ready for their last attempt at a big push. The city itself is flooded with roaming bands of foes.’
‘Numbers?’
‘Thousands within the city. Tens of thousands at the edge, where the warlord waits.’
‘I like those odds,’ Imrich said. They all heard the smile in his words, even from behind his helm.
Argo shook his head. ‘This is not a war we can win without the Guard.’
Now Toma spoke up. He sat in one of the restraining seats, meticulously dismantling and cleaning the sacred bolter given to him by the Ordo Xenos during his tenure in the Inquisitorial kill-teams.
‘Will the Guard win this war without us?’
Argo shrugged. ‘We have our orders.’
Toma pressed on. ‘And once we leave?’
‘The Emperor protects,’ the Chaplain replied.
Imrich’s skulls rattled as he turned. ‘So we flee a war that the Imperium is losing? I don’t like the thought of running from the kine.’
‘Duly noted, but Chapter Master Kantor was clear in his priorities,’ Argo said. ‘And you will do penance for your disrespect of the Enemy, Brother Imrich.’
It was a matter of small shame among some of the Crimson Fists that they referred to the greenskins as kine. On Rynn’s World, another agri-world, it was slang for ‘cattle’.
‘Yes, Brother-Chaplain,’ Imrich growled.
‘Hate the inhuman, slaughter the impure, and praise the Emperor above all. But always respect the foe.’
‘Yes, Brother-Chaplain.’ Imrich wanted to insist Argo stopped quoting the litanies at him. Instead he bowed his head. He knew better than to apologise.
‘When do we move out?’ Demetrian cut in.
‘Tomorrow night, the Guard will advance,’ Argo said, as he held his golden aquila medallion in his red-fingered gauntlet. ‘And we advance with them.’
Dawn found Argo in the cockpit of the Thunderhawk, still in his armour. He sat in one of the command thrones, his elbows on his knees, staring out of the window. He had not slept. He was Astartes. He barely needed sleep.
Toma came to him as he mused on the coming battle. The quiet warrior was a powerful credit to the squad, and Argo – who was over a century younger than the Deathwatch specialist – always welcomed his presence. He suspected it would not be long before the captain of the Fifth selected Toma for promotion into the Crusade Company, or to lead his own squad into the field of war.
‘Another dawn, Brother-Chaplain.’ Toma took the command throne next to Argo, sitting and holding his helm in his hands. The Deathwatch had aged him, Argo saw. New scars, faded from fast treatment but still noticeable, pitted the warrior’s cheek and temple.
‘Acid burns,’ Argo said, gesturing with a gloved hand, his black one. ‘The Deathwatch kept you busy.’
‘I can’t say,’ Toma replied. His face was as expressive as stone.
‘Can’t or won’t?’ Argo asked, already knowing the answer.
‘Both.’
‘The Ordo Xenos keeps its secrets close.’
‘It does.’ Toma’s expression was edged with thought as he replayed hazy recollections, little more than echoes, through his mind. Oaths had been sworn. Promises were made. Memories were torn from the mind by psyk-enhanced meditation and the ungentle scouring of arcane machinery.
It was the first time Argo had seen his fellow Fist’s neutral mask slip, and he found it fascinating.
‘We go to war today,’ the Chaplain said. ‘We are a poor portion of the Fifth’s strength, but we are the Fifth nevertheless. In the fires of war, we are forged. And yet I sense a burden on your soul, brother.’
Toma nodded. This was why he had come.
‘It’s Vayne.’
Brother-Apothecary Vayne was in the Thunderhawk’s confined apothecarion, little more than an operating table and racks of monitoring equipment fastened to the small room’s walls. Already prepared for the battle tonight, he was in full armour with one exception: his head was bare. The white-faced helm that marked him as an Apothecary rested on the surgery table, and this was the first thing Argo saw as he entered. The second thing was Vayne himself, adjusting data readouts on his arm-mounted narthecium. As Argo watched, several surgical spikes and knives snapped back into the bulky medical unit housed on Vayne’s forearm.
Vayne eventually turned to the sound of thrumming power armour, though his enhanced senses would have detected the Chaplain’s approach long before he came into the room.
‘Argo,’ he said in subdued greeting.
‘Vayne,’ the Chaplain nodded back.
The atmosphere between the two men was nothing short of ugly. Seven years before, they’d served together as novices in Nochlitan’s Scout squad. Seven years since the final trials to become Astartes, when Argo had been chosen to wear the black, and Vayne the white.
A Chaplain and an Apothecary drawn from the same Scout un
it. Sergeant Nochlitan, who like Demetrian had served admirably in the Crusade Company among the Chapter’s elite, had been honoured by Chapter Master Kantor himself for honing such excellence in a novice squad.
With the Chapter still in its perilous rebuilding stage, the finest warriors of the Crimson Fists were often charged with the duty of training novice squads. It was no shame to step away from the First Company to the role of Scout-sergeant, and Nochlitan was one of the most respected.
Beyond a few scars, Argo looked no different. The same could not be said for the Apothecary. Half of Vayne’s face was gone, replaced by cold, smooth steel shaped to resemble his features. Despite its artistry, the exquisite workmanship was clear evidence of a terrible wound that had almost been Vayne’s death. Vayne’s left eye, an augmetic lens of synthetic scarlet crystal, whirred in its circular socket as the Apothecary focused his gaze on the Chaplain.
‘You’re looking well,’ he remarked. Argo didn’t reply. He watched as Vayne limped around the surgical table, and considered the rest of the Apothecary’s newly-restored body.
Daemon-fire had done this to Vayne, during the Cleansing of Chiaro two months before. Fresh from the victory on Syral and the destruction of the Cantorial Palace, the Crimson Fists had entered the warp for several weeks to reach Chiaro, answering a call for aid by the planetary governor. Mutant cults were spreading in the rotting industrial sectors of his world. A true purge was needed to stamp the problem out, after the local defence forces had failed to quell the matter.
The Fists had not failed. It took a month and was not without casualties, but their duty was done. The rest of the strike force returned to Rynn’s World at the behest of Chapter Master Kantor. Argo and Squad Demetrian had returned to Syral aboard the support cruiser Vigil.
It had been a cold, quiet journey back to Syral. They were the only Astartes on board, except for a single Apothecary from the Fifth Company that remained to preside over Vayne’s injuries – and act in his stead if the younger man died.
Vayne had suffered as the servitors and his potential replacement rebuilt his body. He was almost certain to die, given the massive burns sustained and their initial refusal to heal. The Chapter would lose a gifted healer in a time when the Fists most desperately needed to reclaim and preserve their fighting strength. Had Vayne died, it would have been a true loss.
From shoulder to fingertips, his left arm was augmetic. It connected internally to the bionic sections of his spine and collarbone, purring in a smooth hiss of expensive augmentation that Argo’s keen hearing could detect even underneath the background hum of their power armour. As with his left arm, so too was his left leg bionic – from hip to toes. The augmentations were still new, still untested in battle, and although Argo doubted a normal human could discern the minute inconsistencies in Vayne’s gait and posture, to Astartes senses it registered as a subtle but noticeable hitch in his stride. A limp.
It was temporary, until the augmetics aligned with Vayne’s body patterns and wholly fused with his biorhythms. The leg ended in a splayed claw of a foot for enhanced stability: a cross of blackened metal that connected to the well-armoured ankle joint and the heavy musculature of the bionic shin and calf above.
‘Your attitude is beginning to create strain within your squad,’ Argo began. ‘I am told you are melancholic.’
Vayne scowled. His false eye hummed in its socket as it tried to conform to his facial expression.
‘Brother-Sergeant Demetrian has said nothing.’
‘You were saved because you have value to the Chapter. You stand in high regard for your skills. Why are you unbalanced by wounds which heal even as we speak?’
Vayne watched his own crimson left gauntlet close and open, repeating the motion several times. It was his bionic arm, and feeling was slow in returning.
‘I trained a lifetime in my own body. Now I fight in someone else’s.’
‘It is still your body.’
‘Not yet. There is acclimatisation to come.’
‘Then you will acclimatise. There is no more to say.’
‘You don’t see? This is not false pathos, Argo. I was perfect before, made in the Emperor’s image in accordance with his ancient and most sacred designs.’
‘You still are.’
‘No. I am a simulacrum.’ He clenched his augmetic hand into a numb fist. ‘I am the best imitation we are capable of creating. I am no longer perfect.’
‘Our brothers in the Iron Hands would dispute that diagnosis.’
Vayne scoffed. ‘Those uninspired slaves of the Mechanicum? They make war at the pace of toothless old men.’
‘If you resort to insults against our brother Chapters, I will lose my temper as well as my patience.’
‘My point is that I am no Iron Hand. And I have no wish to be some half-flesh imitation Astartes.’
‘You will acclimatise,’ Argo stepped forward, taking Vayne’s helm from the table and looking down at the white faceplate.
‘Even so, until then I am a liability to my brothers.’
Argo handed his friend the helmet and shook his head. ‘You are petulant beyond my comprehension. Only in death does duty end. We are the Fists. We are the shield-hand of Dorn. We do not weep and cower from battle because of pain or fear or worries of what might yet be. We fight and die because we were made to fight and die.’
Vayne took the helm and smiled without humour. Half of his face didn’t follow the expression.
‘What amuses you?’
‘You are blind, Argo. You may preserve the soul of our Chapter, but I preserve its body. I harvest the gene-seed of the fallen, and I ensure the wounded will fight again. So listen to me, brother. I fear nothing but allowing my failures to harm my brethren. I am not at peak performance, and I am unused to the wounds I still wear under this armour. That is the source of my unbalance.’
‘You lose your own argument. You fear to let down your brothers because your battle skills are hindered for a short while. Vayne, you are harming your brothers far more with your withdrawn attitude and the bitterness leaking from your every word. You are eroding their trust in you, and destroying their confidence.’
Argo’s battle-collar pulsed a single blip. He tensed his neck, activating the pearl-like vox-bead attached to his throat, which picked up the vibrations of his vocal chords.
‘Brother-Chaplain Argo. Speak.’
‘Brother-Chaplain,’ it was Lord General Ulviran. ‘I have a request to ask you and your warriors.’
‘I will be with you shortly,’ Argo said, and killed the link. The silence between Argo and Vayne returned.
‘Your point is taken,’ Vayne conceded. ‘I will not allow my melancholy to taint my squad any longer.’
‘That is all I demand.’ Argo was already turning to leave.
‘I remember a time when you could not make such demands of me, Argo.’
‘I remember a time when I did not need to make them.’
The Fists shed blood before the Guard’s night-time advance. Under Ulviran’s request, Argo and Demetrian led the squad into the shattered remains of the city’s western sector.
In the minutes leading up to deployment, Argo had gathered the warriors together in the shadow of their Thunderhawk. Dozens of Guardsmen around the camp looked on, dallying about their business while they watched the Astartes soldiers perform their rite. The Fists ignored them all.
With his gladius, Argo sliced the palms of each warrior’s left hand. They, in turn, pressed their bleeding hands against the chest piece of the Fist next to them.
Imrich rested his hand on the embossed silver eagle decorating Toma’s breastplate. The Larraman cells in his blood scabbed and sealed the gash quickly, but not before his palm left a dark smear on Toma’s Imperial symbol.
‘My life for you,’ Imrich said, then removed his hand and fastened his helm. Toma was next, pres
sing his bleeding hand against Vayne’s breastplate.
‘My life for you,’ the Deathwatch veteran said, before donning his own helm. Vayne forced a smile. He had to perform the rite with his remaining flesh hand, his right instead of his left, and did so without complaint.
When it came to the Chaplain’s turn, Argo rested his hand on Demetrian’s armour, as tradition necessitated the officiating Chaplain to honour the ranking officer.
‘My life for you,’ Argo said. A moment later, his senses were submerged in the audiovisual chaos of his battle helm. On the eye lens displays, he saw the flickering readouts of the squad’s vital signs, communication runes, lists of vox-channels, sight-altering lens options, thermo-conditional and local atmospheric readouts, and a cluster of information pertaining to the myriad functions of his armour.
All of the information added up to one thing.
‘Ready,’ he voxed to the others, blink-clicking most of the lens displays into transparency.
‘Ready,’ they voxed back. They’d started walking then, loping strides that emitted a chorus of mechanical growls from their armour joints. The Guardsmen parted like a split sea as the Astartes neared them.
With blood on their Imperial eagles, the Crimson Fists went to war.
That had been three hours ago. The Fists took a Guard Chimera troop transport to the city limits, and were advancing through the western edge of Southspire. It was a scouting run, and progress was predicted – by Lord General Ulviran – to be fast. Intelligence had pinned enemy resistance in this section of the city to be minimal. Only at the city’s centre was resistance expected to pick up.
Intelligence had been wrong about that.
Argo crouched in the ruins of what had once been an Administratum building, where hundreds of barely-educated wage slaves typed their lives away into cogitators that amassed Syral’s exportation data. Pressed against a wall half tumbled down months ago from Imperial Basilisk shelling, the Chaplain waited unmoving, listening to the thrum of his power armour and the sounds of several foes breathing nearby.