25 For 25

by Various

  The first bolt clipped the bone of the claw even as it cut down towards him and ricocheted away. The second passed straight through the fleshy arm before detonating on the other side. But the third struck hard between two ribs of its exoskeleton. The explosion jolted the monster from its attack even as its blowback blinded Hwygir for a critical moment. The injured claw retracted early, the other was forced off its line and carved a bloody streak down the side of the Scout’s leg instead of chopping his head in two.

  Both Hwygir and the monster stumbled back for a moment. The savage dropped the sights of the heavy bolter, trying to blink his eyes clear, and his torch swivelled away from the monster just as it sprang and flipped over, digging back underground. Its thick snake-tail shot from the darkness, puncturing the casing of the heavy weapon on Hwygir’s shoulder with such force as to knock it into the side of his head and leave him stunned.

  ‘Burrower! Get clear!’ It was Vitellios, shouting from cover.

  Vitellios on one side and Pasan on the other desperately flashed their torches in every direction, hoping to catch a glimpse of the creature before it struck again.

  ‘There!’ Vitellios shouted.

  ‘There!’ Pasan cried.

  They were facing in different directions. Vitellios had already fired; the hollow bark of a shotgun blast hitting nothing but the empty air echoed back to us. I pulled the torch from my pistol and twisted it in my hand. It blossomed with light in every direction.

  ‘Quiet, you fools!’ I hissed at them, drawing my falx as well. ‘It’s a ravener. It goes after the vibrations!’

  They both stopped talking at that. I looked about the cavern in the dim, grey light. There was nothing on the surface to suggest any movement beneath. Hwygir was moving slightly beside the hole from which the ravener had burst. I saw Narro as well; he was lying beneath the beacon, smashed between it and the ravener’s first attack. Hwygir saw him too and started slowly to crawl over to him, leaving the heavy bolter where it had fallen.

  ‘No, you…’ I cursed, but the trog did not hear me. Pasan did though. He suddenly stepped forwards, then picked up his feet and started to run. Great, booming, heavy steps. Not towards the heavy weapon, but away from it. I sensed, rather than saw, the ravener below us twist within the ship’s flesh to go after him.

  ‘Pasan! I order you–’ I called after him, but I knew he was not going to stop.

  I jerked my head around to Vitellios. ‘Get the bolter. I’ll get him.’ I snapped, and powered after the running Scout.

  Pasan knew both I and the ravener were after him now and quickened his pace over the leathery surface. In a shower of flesh and fluid, the ravener burst not from the floor, but from the wall. Pasan leapt and rolled, but the tyranid beast caught his leg in one of its grasping hands, flicked him around and hammered him against a chitinous strut. The shotgun flew from Pasan’s hands as his body went limp, and it drew a claw back to slice him in two.

  I bellowed at the beast as I ran and fired my pistol as fast as it allowed. My snap-shots blew the flesh from the walls and the beast indiscriminately and it twisted in pain. It coiled, ready to burrow again, and I dropped my pistol and raised my falx with both hands. The ravener leapt. I swung. The falx’s tip pierced its carapace and hooked inside. I was yanked off my feet as the ravener dug down at an extraordinary rate. It dragged me on and I braced as I sped towards the hole it had created. My body hit the ground splayed across the hole and went no further. The ravener threatened to pull my weapon from my hands, but my grip was like steel. It thrashed beneath me, churning up the ship-flesh around it. Its tail, still in the air, whipped back and forth, battering at my side. I held on. It strained even harder against the hook of the falx and I felt it begin to tear itself clear. The next time the tail struck, I seized it with one arm, then released the falx and grasped it with my other.

  ‘Vitellios!’ I called. He was already running towards me, the heavy bolter cradled in his arms.

  Beneath me, the ravener spiralled in my grip to try and escape; its scythes lashed up and punctured my armour, but I was too close for it to cut deep. Vitellios, only a few steps away, brought the bolter up, ready to fire. With a heave, I wrenched it out of the ground to give Vitellios a clear shot and, as I did so, it coiled into the air. Part of its thorax came free and I saw it grow an ugly pyramid-like cyst. It was a weapon, and it was pointed straight at me.

  Vitellios and the ravener fired at exactly the same instant. The hive-trash pumped the beast full of bolt-shells that burrowed down along the length of its body and exploded. The bio-weapon shot a burst of slugs into me that burrowed up into my body and did nothing more.

  I collapsed over the tyranid’s remains. I did not know then what had hit me, only that my armour had been pierced. There was pain, but it was not incapacitating. I had seen brothers hit by tyranid weapons go mad or be burnt from the inside out, but as my hearts beat all the harder to race my blood around my veins I felt neither come upon me.

  ‘How do, sergeant? You okay?’ Vitellios had fallen to his knees beside me, his tone even more self-satisfied in victory. ‘Caught ourselves a big one today.’

  ‘Coward,’ I replied coldly.

  ‘What?’ He looked shocked. ‘Coward? I just saved your–’

  ‘After you ran. After you fled.’

  ‘I… That wasn’t…’ He was incensed. Almost ready to reload that bolter and use it on me. I did not care. ‘That was doctrine! You’re ambushed, you break free! Then you look to strike back!’

  ‘Leaving your brothers to fend for themselves? Do not use doctrine to try to excuse that.’

  Pasan had come round and was struggling upright. I heaved myself to my feet; my blessed body was raging, fighting to repair the damage done to it, but I would not show these neophytes even a hint of my weakness.

  ‘You’re pathetic. Both of you,’ I told them. ‘Pasan, get yourself up. Vitellios, go back. Check on the others.’

  Vitellios stomped away and called after his brothers.

  ‘Narro! Hwygir! If you’re dead, raise your hands…’ After a moment’s pause, he turned back to me: ‘They’re good.’

  Then he made a gesture in my direction that I am certain would have meant something to me had I been born amongst hive-trash like him, and continued away. Pasan was on his feet now, his helmet facing shattered, his face cut, bruised and crumpled.

  ‘Honoured sergeant–’ he began.

  ‘Later,’ I said. ‘You will explain your actions later. Let us just get ourselves off this piece of thrice-damned filth.’

  We hobbled back to where Narro and Hwygir had fallen. In spite of Vitellios’s ignoble sense of humour, both still lived. I caught sight of the beacon again and the order scrawled there: VIDESUB. Look down. Another joke.

  But it wasn’t. For Vitellios spoke up again, and this time his voice was neither smug nor bitter. It was in awe.

  ‘Sergeant Tiresias.’ He shone his torch down into the hole below the beacon where the ravener had hibernated. In the violence of its awakening, however, it had scratched open a cavity even further beneath. Down there, glinting back in the light, shone the shoulder armour of a Space Marine. And upon that armour was inscribed the legend:

  CASSIOS

  The Space Marine’s vital signs barely registered on our auspex. His metabolism was as slow as a glacier. He might easily have been mistaken for dead, but we knew better. Even in suspended animation, he was an impressive figure. His chest was the size of a barrel, his armour was crafted and worked with a pattern of lamellar, festooned with images of victories and great feats through the owner’s life. The neophytes stood, slack-jawed, gaping at him. For once, I shared their sense of wonder.

  We dug him from his cradle and commenced the ritual to rouse him there. It was not worthy of a survivor, a hero such as he, to be borne back to his home as though he were an infant. I would not have the retainers see him in such a state. I would give him the chance to stand alone, if he willed it, and return as a hero should.
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  We waited on guard, expectant, for an hour or more. Tending our own wounds, but staying silent aside from checking the auspex readings. Then, finally, his chest heaved. His eyes opened.

  Commander Cassios stepped from the darkness of the tunnel and into the beams of the powerful floodlights set up by the retainer crews working within the cavern of the bio-titans.

  Gricole saw him at once and called his workers to order. They stood, hushed, as Commander Cassios walked amongst them. He, in turn, acknowledged them, and appeared about to speak, and then he saw what their work was. He dropped to his knees, resting his hands upon the armour of his men. His head was bowed, he was praying. Gricole ordered his men away and I did the same with my wards. A warrior such as Cassios deserved to be allowed to keep such a moment private.

  After they had cleared away from the cavity, he stood and moved through the rest of the armour and possessions that Gricole’s men had been carefully storing.

  ‘Valens. Nikos. Leo. Abas. Tiberios. Messinus. Herakleios.’ Names; he could name each one just from what little remained.

  ‘Theodosios. He was my captain.’ I realised that Cassios was addressing me. ‘It was so hard for him to ask me to lead the diversionary attack. I volunteered. I insisted! I knew that our company only stood a chance of escape if he was leading the way…’ his voice trailed off.

  I brought Cassios out with me and took him back to the boat. Only Gricole was waiting for us there. He looked at me, concerned. He tried to see to my wounds, but I waved him away. My Astartes physiology had started healing me from the moment I was wounded; whatever poison the ravener had pumped into me, my body would defeat that just as I had overcome the beast. In any case, I had a more pressing task to address, though it was one I would have given my life not to have to fulfil.

  The 5th Company had fought and died against the Kraken before the rest of us had even known it had emerged from the void. Cassios had been here ever since. He believed he had lost his men. He did not know he had lost so much more.

  The days and weeks after Ichar IV were ones of celebration for the militia defenders of Bosphor, who had never fought the Kraken and now never would. My brother Astartes and I were in no mood to join them and we retreated to our ships.

  Some of us immersed ourselves in prayer, others in rage. A few, gripped by madness at what they had seen and what they had lost, rampaged around the ship until they were forcibly restrained. There were accidents. At least, we called them accidents. We Astartes have no word for the act where a brother chooses to end his service in such a manner. It is not spoken of, but his gene-seed is sequestered, marked as potentially deviant, as though it was a disease of the body and not of the soul.

  I thought I had seen every reaction there was to the tragedy of our Chapter. I was wrong. When I told Cassios of the battles, of the losses, of what we had been reduced to, he showed me something different. He showed me the response of a hero.

  Cassios had had his eyes closed, standing perfectly still, for nearly a minute. Then his face screwed up in rage, but he did not shout, he breathed. He took great heaving breaths as though he could blow the emotion out from his body and into the air. Then his eyes opened.

  ‘And what is being done?’ he asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘What is being done to revenge ourselves against this abomination? What is being done to strike back? What is being done to rid our space of this bastard xenos curse for good?’

  I placed my hand upon his shoulder.

  ‘As soon as we return to The Heart of Cronus they will tell you all. We will leave at once. Your brothers will be most eager to see you again.’

  I smiled at him, but he did not return it.

  ‘We cannot leave before we are finished here.’

  ‘Before we are finished?’ I asked. ‘You are here with us. What more is there?’

  Cassios tilted his head a fraction, indicating out the window. ‘This ship, nearly half my company, it killed them, feasted on them.’

  ‘And it is dead now,’ I reassured him.

  ‘We did not kill it.’

  ‘No, but perhaps our brother-Chapters did on Ichar IV or perhaps it was the servants of the Navy. I understand you want satisfaction, commander. Believe me, I want that for every brother we lost. But our service is done. You cannot kill it again.’

  ‘You misunderstand me, brother-sergeant. It was never killed. The ship still lives.’

  Thracian disappeared from our midst then; for several days we were told he had secluded himself to meditate upon the Emperor’s will for our Chapter, but then we discovered he had left us entirely on some secret task. He had told us before that we would take the time to rebuild, restore ourselves, and there were many who disagreed with that intention.

  I do not expect you to understand. We are Astartes. We are not like you. We do not wake in the morning and muse upon what our purpose may be that day. We know. From the day we are chosen to the day that we die we know what our purpose is. We fight in the name of the Emperor. If we are ordered, then we go. If we are struck, we strike back. If we fall, then we do so knowing that others will take our place. We do not pause, we do not hold back, we do not relent.

  We fight. That is our service to the Emperor. That is what we are. If we do not fight, then we do not serve Him. If we do not serve Him, we are lost. One might as soon as tell a mechanicus not to build, a missionary not to preach, a telepath not to think, a ship not to sail. How can they? What use are they without it? And yet that was what Thracian was asking us to do because if we were to suffer the casualties of even the most minor of campaigns, it would be enough to finish us for good. If we wanted to survive, we could not lose anymore. We could not lose anymore, so we could no longer fight. And for how long?

  Our armoury, our training grounds, a whole world of our recruits that had been lost with Sotha, perhaps those could be restored. But what of the gene-seed? Both in our living brothers and in our stores lost with Sotha, both now devoured by the Kraken. Without gene-seed there could be no more Astartes, and gene-seed can only be grown within an Astartes, from the progenoid glands implanted in us as youths. There were barely more than a hundred of us left. Most had already had their glands taken when they had matured, to be kept safe in the gene-banks of Sotha. Those few of us in whom they had still not matured… how many new generations would it take to recover our numbers? How many years would the Chapter be leashed, unable to put more than a bare company into the field? Fifty? A hundred? Could we ever recover or would we just fade into ghosts of what we had been? A cautionary tale: the Chapter that feared its own end so greatly they placed themselves above their oaths, their service to Him.

  No, better to end it all with a final crusade. That is what my commander, Brother-Sergeant Angeloi, said to me, and I agreed as many others did in the corridors of The Heart of Cronus. When Thracian returned to us we would tell him what his men had decided and we would require his acceptance. This was not for glory, this was for our souls. We had been great once, let our story end well in a great crusade that would end only when the last of us fell. Other Chapters would then stand forward to take up our duty and our spirits would join His light as His proud warriors and our names would be spoken with glory as long as mankind endured.

  ‘Trust me, commander–’ I raised my voice higher, trying to make him see sense.

  ‘You may trust me, sergeant. I have been aboard that monster for nearly three years. Do not doubt what I say.’

  ‘The auspex–’

  ‘The auspex is wrong. Our technology, blessed be His works, has been wrong as often as it has been right. We are not some dependent xenos like the tau, we rely on human flesh and blood, and there is a spark of life there, I know it.’

  ‘Even so,’ I declared, ‘it does not matter.’

  Cassios blinked. That had surprised him.

  ‘It does not matter?’ Cassios raised his eyebrow. ‘Explain yourself, sergeant.’

  ‘So it lives, despite the auspex, de
spite what we saw aboard, the ship lives. It does not matter. We will still leave. We will send a despatch to the battlefleet, they will send a warship and destroy it for good.’

  ‘You said yourself, sergeant, the battlefleet is fully engaged with the hive fleets splintered from Ichar IV. There will be no warship, and this abomination will heal and be the death of further worlds. It is not befitting an Astartes to pass his duty on to lesser men.’

  ‘Then we will return with all our brothers. With our warships. We shall destroy this beast ourselves.’

  ‘We are here now. We shall finish it now. Make your preparations for reinsertion. That is my last word on the matter.’

  ‘But it is not mine…’ I told him.

  ‘Are you challenging my authority, sergeant?’

  ‘No,’ I replied calmly. ‘You are challenging mine, commander. This team is mine. This mission is mine. And you… are not permitted to command.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have been aboard that ship three years, brother,’ I spoke softly. ‘Surrounded by the xenos, one of them just centimetres from you. We do not know what has happened to you. You do not even know. Doctrine is clear. Until you return with us, until you are examined by the Apothecary and purified, you have no authority to hold.’

  To that, Cassios had no answer.

  I left Cassios to himself and started walking back along the narrow corridors of the assault boat. I headed for the Apothecarion. I was sick. I did not know if it was the other injuries or the infection of the ship, but whatever war was being waged inside me against the ravener’s venom, I was losing. My guts burned, my head felt as though it was floating above my body. I stumbled on a step and, at that noise, the neophytes appeared from the next cabin. Concerned, they rushed to my side, but I waved them away. No weakness. No weakness in front of them.