by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
‘My answer would be, if you have the guts to imagine a worthy punishment then I have the guts to take it on.’
‘You see a challenge, then? That is interesting. Perhaps if we grind you down and break you, we can rebuild you into something worthy. Something to stand among the heroes of the Imperium. Perhaps you can be a Space Marine.’
Midnias looked up at the dark shape, squinting in the half-light to make out the details of the ornate armour. ‘A what?’
In the press of greenskin flesh it seemed Obstiria was gone, replaced by an endless, hellish plane of ork bodies stretching out forever.
Midnias hacked left and right with his power sword. Flesh parted and more orks poured through. The air was thick with the stink of their blood. Around him the battle-brothers he had chosen to join him fought to keep up. Some of them had already been left behind in the charge, bogged down fighting the orks who sought to swamp and butcher them with cleavers and jagged blades.
‘To me!’ he yelled into the vox as he mounted a low rise and cleared the orks from around him with a wide two-handed sweep of his sword. ‘Form up! We strike as one or we strike not at all!’
The Obsidian Blades struggled towards him. Behind them, up on the ridge, Captains Keshuma and Elhalil led the battle-line in firing volley after volley into the orks, forcing them back down the gulch and turning the ork advance into a brutal scrum. Grukk could not manoeuvre out of Black Gulch now, not with the entire army backed up around it. It was as vulnerable as a creature like it could be.
Midnias grabbed an Obsidian Glaive’s hand and hauled him out of the melee. The battle-brother was slick with ork blood. His armour was nicked and scored all over by cleaver blows he had turned aside and his chainblade was almost clogged with stringy ork flesh.
The Obsidian Glaive’s faceplate turned to the sky. Midnias allowed himself a glance upwards.
‘It’s the Darkest Hour,’ he voxed. ‘Our brethren have arrived. Onward, sons of Obstiria! While the horde fights a dozen battles at once, we shall win victory in ours!’
The other Obsidian Glaives were reaching Midnias’s position. Most of them had made it this far. All of them were covered head to toe in gore. All of them had enough fight left in them for the final stretch.
The orks would be busy facing the new threats raining down on them from above. Midnias had to strike now. There would never be another chance to save his Chapter.
He opened up the exhausts on his jump pack. Blue-white flame roared behind him.
‘Charge!’ he ordered. As one, his chosen Obsidian Glaives rocketed into the air, making another leap across the horde towards Grukk.
As the rise receded below him, a strange thought caught light in a corner of Midnias’s mind. He had been here before.
Black Gulch was one of the few routes by foot into the foothills around Penumbral Spike – a bleak and brutal path, but one that a Space Marine could weather. For someone without the augmentations of an Obsidian Glaive, or whose augmentations had not yet begun to fully function, it was little better than a death sentence.
Midnias had walked it in the night when the radiation was less severe. Even so it had covered his back, shoulders and newly-shaven scalp with burns that wept and cracked as dawn rose over the mountains.
There was barely any shelter down there. If a recruit did not find shade from the radioactive sun, he would die. It was that simple. The Obsidian Glaives did not welcome new recruits who were willing to lie down on the scalding rocks and accept their death.
Midnias shielded his eyes from the early morning rays. He had stumbled almost unthinkingly through the night and only now stopped to take proper stock of his surroundings. The knife-sharp ridges up either side of the gulch were out of the question – even if there was a cave or an overhang up there he would be dead before he reached it. A short stumble away was a rise in the ground, and perhaps on the other side there would be enough of a hollow for him to crawl into and wait out the day.
His feet left bloody footprints as he walked to the rise. He rounded it to see that the stone overhung enough for a man to roll under it and, perhaps, escape the sun. He could tell this because there was already a man there.
Another recruit. Midnias had known he was not alone on this pilgrimage from the flats to the Penumbral Spike, but this was the first fellow he had seen since he had crawled blindly into the glare of the sun upon being dropped from a gunship. Both men had been dropped onto the flats with orders to reach Penumbral Spike, a test that had to be passed before he could call the Obsidian Glaives his brothers and walk amongst them as a Space Marine.
There was not enough room in the hollow for both of them.
Midnias caught his heart before it sank.
He crouched beside the hollow. The recruit noticed him and the two looked at one another. The other recruit – Midnias had never seen him before – was as fit and muscular as Midnias himself, his body just starting to adapt to the new organs promoting bone and muscle growth. His shoulder and face were burned maroon with the sun’s glare. He wore nothing but a loincloth. In all respects he looked just like Midnias himself must have done.
Midnias grabbed the other recruit’s arm and dragged him out of the hollow. The recruit wrapped an arm around Midnias’s neck and forced his chin down to his chest, trying to cut off his air and throttle him. Midnias kneed the recruit in the groin and pushed him back against the lip of rock. The recruit hit hard and his grip relaxed. Midnias wrenched his head out and drove an elbow into the recruit’s shoulder.
Bone broke. The recruit sagged. Midnias only had a second. He grabbed the wrist of the wounded arm and twisted it around. The recruit cried out as the broken shoulder bones were torn out of place. Midnias spun on a heel and threw the recruit over his shoulder.
The recruit fought back. He was staring up at death twofold – Midnias, and the burning sky above. He kicked out at Midnias’s leg and it buckled. Midnias fell on top of the other recruit and they wrestled on the rocks.
Midnias forced an arm free and drove the heel of his hand into the recruit’s jaw. He felt his bones break. Ripples of pain and numbness ran up his arm. He found his footing and lifted the recruit off the ground, slamming him again into the rock. The recruit growled as he held on and Midnias hit him again, again, until both hands were unfeeling clubs of bloodied bone.
It was only when Midnias smelled his own skin burning in the rising sun that he paused. The recruit did not move. His face was split open and gushing blood. If he was not dead, he would be soon.
‘We are here for punishment,’ said Midnias through cracked lips. ‘Yours is over. The next I shall endure.’
He crawled on his belly into the fold of rock. The shade was barely any relief at all, but the sizzling from his burned back stopped.
Midnias’s life from now on was punishment. The other recruit had deserved only death. Midnias deserved more.
The battle-brothers from the Darkest Hour hammered into the orkish lines. Where their drop pods landed, great plumes of pulverised rock and ork bodies were flung into the air. Some pods split open to reveal deathwind missile launchers and hurricane bolters blasting fire at everything that moved around them. Most, however, carried Obsidian Glaives.
These battle-brothers had been too late to fight in the siege of their fortress. They owed the greenskins death.
Midnias was just able to see the ripple of the drop pods’ impact running right across Black Gulch before he landed again. He had aimed his last jump at a patch of blood-streaked rock momentarily free of orks. He landed running, impaling the nearest ork with his blade. His fellow Obsidian Glaives landed a moment later.
‘There!’ cried Midnias. ‘The warlord! We are nearly there, my brethren!’
Warlord Grukk had leapt into the fray as the battle-brothers from the Darkest Hour made landfall. A drop pod had slammed into the gulch a short run from the xenos leader.
Grukk threw other greenskins aside to get at it. The pod was the size of a tank with grav-dampened restraints inside to hold a full squad of ten Space Marines. Grukk leered bloodily as it reached the drop pod before its explosive bolts fired to split it open. The warlord clambered on top and wrenched one of the steel plates aside.
Midnias sprinted into the wall of orks between him and the warlord. The mass of flesh gave but did not break. He threw one ork aside even as he cut another clean in two. Cleavers hacked at him – he caught one on a shoulder guard, spun in place and drove a reverse thrust into the belly of the alien trying to kill him.
Grukk laughed. He reached into the drop pod and ripped out a handful of mangled ceramite and flesh. Bolter fire stuttered up at him from inside but the impacts didn’t seem to register on the enormous ork. It roared in anger and delight and crammed a handful of Obsidian Glaive into its mouth. It tore another side off the drop pod and dived into the battle-brothers inside. It ripped at them in a fury, its claws throwing chunks of armour and meat into the air as the other greenskins cheered.
There was no room in Midnias’s mind for anything but hatred. For an alien to kill an Obsidian Glaive was an obscenity. For it to do so as sport, with thousands of other xenos cheering it on, was blasphemy.
And it was a failure. Every Obsidian Glaive who fell was a crime laid at Midnias’s door. As Chapter Master it was his responsibility and he would be punished. But the ork would be punished first.
Midnias left the other Obsidian Glaives behind as he roared through the orks. He swung his blade two-handed, ignoring the blows that came his way. Grukk tore out another handful of broken limbs as Midnias rose on a rampart of butchered orks to reach level with the top of the drop pod.
Grukk clambered out, spattered with the gore of ten dead Obsidian Glaives. It turned greedy eyes on Midnias and pointed a talon at him.
‘Are we but sport to you?’ demanded Midnias, not caring if Grukk understood his words. ‘Then take this prize, alien! Wear this corpse on your armour! But cut me down first!’
Grukk bellowed a war cry in the orkish tongue. The other orks nearby cowered back, for Grukk had marked out Midnias as his to kill alone.
A punishment would be meted out here. The Emperor alone knew which one would suffer it.
Midnias ran right at the towering ork. The ork charged, horns down like a bull. In the heart of the swirling bloodshed of Black Gulch, they collided.
Every drop of shed blood was a failure. That counted no matter which Obsidian Glaive shed it, from a newly-inducted scout to one an ancient with a thousand years of battle experience. But some, when they fell, put a greater stain on those responsible than others.
It had been thirty years before, when Midnias fought in the Chapter’s First Company, that he last walked the labyrinth of passes and gulches that led to the foothills of Penumbral Spike. Three other brothers of the First Company walked alongside him, their armour stripped off, as they carried their burden on their shoulders.
‘I should have taken the bullet myself,’ said one, Brother Varas.
‘I should have warned him,’ said Brother Madrilar. He walked with a limp, as a stray round in the battle for the Hargraven Basilica had hit him in the meat of the thigh.
‘His wounds were too grave,’ said Brother Kess, the First Company’s Apothecary. ‘There was more shrapnel than I thought. I should have saved him.
‘I killed the traitor who took the shot,’ said Midnias. ‘But I was a second too late.’
Ahead of them, the peak of Penumbral Spike broke through among the mountain peaks. A flock of predatory birds circled the peak as if waiting for the four penitents. The sun was directly overhead, baking the rocks with radiation.
‘It is noon,’ said Varas. ‘Set down your burden and pray.’
The four Obsidian Glaives set down the litter they were carrying. It was covered in a black silken shroud. Midnias flexed his hands – even now, after so many years, he felt the pain of the fingers he had broken when he had killed the other recruit. Every time the ghost of that pain rose in his hands he remembered what he had done to survive, and every one of his failings since then.
The burden he helped carry was one such failure. Perhaps the greatest.
Midnias pulled back the corner of the shroud. It revealed the scarred face of Chapter Master Lukal who, until the Battle for Hargraven Basilica, had led the Obsidian Glaives. He had died there, and the four battle-brothers who carried his corpse to Penumbral Spike had condemned themselves as most responsible.
‘We will see you to the vaults, my lord,’ said Midnias. ‘We will hold vigil at your tomb. This too we shall endure.’
‘This too we shall endure,’ said the other Obsidian Glaives.
Midnias drew the shroud back over Lukal’s face.
‘They say,’ said Varas, ‘that you will one day wear the Crown of Obstiria, Brother Midnias.’
‘Me?’ asked Midnias.
‘I was one of Lukal’s honour guard,’ said Varas, ‘and most Chapter Masters once served there. But I am too impulsive to lead my brothers, and no other among us is suitable. A new Chapter Master will probably be appointed from among the company captains, but is any of them a strategist or inspiration as Lukal was? No, they will merely serve until one more able is found. It is said that with time, that may be you, Midnias. You will one day be Chapter Master, if your potential is realised and fate spares you death until then.’
Midnias looked from the shrouded corpse to Penumbral Spike. The fortress was still distant. It was a long and gruelling walk.
‘Then my punishment has only just begun,’ he said.
Midnias’s sword arced down in a blur, its edge aimed for Grukk’s neck.
The ork turned at the last split-second and the blade hacked deep into the meat of its shoulder. The power field ripped through muscle and bone but the ork was so massive the wound was not mortal.
Grukk grinned, its tiny red eyes glimmering. The foulness of rotting meat and old blood washed over Midnias. Midnias wrenched the blade free and drew it back for another strike. If he caught Grukk’s neck he could take the warlord’s head off. If he struck the same place he might cut through an organ the greenskin could not live without.
Grukk dropped to one knee and raised a massive fist. It caught the blade in its hand. The edge sliced deep through its palm and into its forearm but the ork registered no pain – it just laughed as Midnias fought to wrench the blade out of the bone.
Grukk’s other fist pistoned up in a massive uppercut that slammed into Midnias’s chest and face.
Blackness spun around Midnias’s head. All the old pains ghosted up through his body – the burns across his back, the bullet and blade wounds across his chest, the surgical scars all over his body. His hands hurt worst of all, as if they were full of needles or immersed in scalding water.
He took the pain and held on to it. The pain meant he was not dead. No, he was still to be punished for his crimes and his failings. He forced a hand beneath him and pushed himself up.
Midnias’s helmet had been torn from his head. The Crown of Obstiria lay on the stone beside him.
Grukk wrapped a massive hand around Midnias’s body, pinning his arms to his sides. The ork’s mouth yawned open, revealing rows of gory fangs leading to a hungry black throat.
It could be absurd, the thoughts that came to even a Space Marine, even a Chapter Master, in times of crisis. Midnias was back in the cell again, before he had ever met the Chaplain who recruited him into the Obsidian Glaives. This time he was looking at himself as if he was hovering in the corner of the cell, and saw not a Space Marine but a scrawny, filthy criminal, the lowest of the dregs who plagued that spaceship’s crew. Nothing but a condemned man, waiting for a well-deserved bullet in the back of the head in punishment for…
For what?
Midnias no longer remembered what he had done
to be put in that cell. It was the crime that had led to him becoming an Obsidian Glaive, and suffering the endless punishment that was the Emperor’s gift to that Chapter. Yet he did not remember what he had done.
As Midnias’s head was forced down into Grukk’s maw, he tried to draw out some flicker of memory about his crime.
The mouth closed. Fangs bored through the back of his neck and up through his jaw into his skull.
To deserve a death like this, thought Midnias, to have served so unflinchingly and yet to be a trophy kill for an alien, he must have done something terrible indeed.
Grukk’s jaws closed, and Midnias’s execution was carried out at last.
Defensive Emplacement Dornmeyer, Hive Morn
The orks spilled through the ruptures in the outer shell of the hive like blood from a gaping wound. A raucous cacophony split the smoky air, duelling with the shriek of engines and the stolid thump of the internal defensive batteries as they were winched down by the emplacement servitors to fire at the horde that rapidly filled the outer hab-ring of Hive Morn.
The shell of the hive shuddered again as the ork machines outside on the dead dusty plain emptied their weaponry into it. The vibration of the constant barrage sounded like distant thunder, but grew louder when one of the great plates of metal, forged and fitted in centuries past and hundreds of metres across in width, was torn from the shell of the hive and punched inwards to fall down into the hive like a man-made comet. Buildings were obliterated in its descent, and orks and humans both vanished in its shadow. When it hit, the ground shook, and cracks crawled upwards along the foundations of the defensive batteries. A cloud of smoke and dust spread outwards from the point of impact like a choking, opaque wave.
Ghul Jensen, twenty-fourth to bear the name, twenty-fifth to rule the world for which he was named, drew his chainsword and thumbed the activator switch as the dust cloud rolled over the emplacement wall and enveloped him. Everything went dark for a moment before the internal systems of his artificer armour, forged for the first to bear his name, acted to compensate. The armour was a thing of unique artistry, crafted by the servants of the Machine-God. It was not quite up to the standards of the power armour worn by the Emperor’s truest servants, but it was better than nothing. Targeting readouts scrolled across the eyepieces of the grotesque war-mask he wore, and he could feel the ancient pneumatic systems wheeze to life, tightening and hissing as he readied himself. He glanced about, checking that the defences were shipshape, one last time.