Jilenne and her children had joined the group now, and the female pilgrims were making a great fuss over them. Dasat smiled as he watched.
‘I will leave you to become acquainted,’ said Kantor, turning from the little man. He gestured for Cortez to walk with him.
Behind them, Dasat pressed his head to the ground again, then turned and rose to introduce himself to Jilenne.
‘Did you see it?’ Kantor asked Cortez. ‘It is quite remarkable, yes?’
Cortez detected unexpected pain in the Chapter Master’s voice. ‘I’m sorry, Pedro,’ he said. ‘Did I see what?’
Kantor angled his head to look at him while they walked. ‘The resemblance, Alessio. The resemblance. This man, this Dasat… He reminds me so much of Ramir that I had to look twice to be sure I wasn’t seeing things.’
Now Cortez understood the pain in his old friend’s voice.
‘I’m sorry, brother,’ he said, ‘but I don’t see it. The ordinator was easily twice that man’s size.’ He paused. ‘And Ramir Savales would have died fighting with his bare hands rather than let the orks take him alive.’
Kantor was taken aback at the anger he detected in that last sentence. He stopped and faced the captain.
‘Do you detest them, Alessio?’ he asked. ‘Do you hate them because they cling to life so desperately?’
‘I do not hate them,’ said Cortez. ‘But they are another burden on us now. I admit that the woman and the children were my doing, Pedro. I wish it were otherwise. But now we are shepherding almost thirty people, none of whom are even armed. Where will you draw the line?’
Kantor answered through lips drawn tight. ‘There was a line, Alessio. Remember that. There was a line, and it was you who crossed it. Now we are responsible for these people, and you will protect them. You will honour the name Rogal Dorn, and you will honour me.’
As he turned and strode away from Cortez, he had one last thing to say.
‘Get your squad ready, captain. You are on point.’
Menaleos Dasat was awed and terrified at the same time, but he dared not show the latter for fear of insulting his saviours. All his life, he had preached the Imperial creed to any who would listen. He was no ecclesiarch, just the son of a simple farmer, but his faith in the Emperor of Mankind was a powerful thing, and over the years he had drawn others about him, others who needed more in their lives, needed something to believe in, something to give their labours a grander purpose.
Dasat had grown up in a crop-harvesting settlement just north of Sagarro, on the provincial border between Inpharis and Rynnland. In his early years, he had often travelled to the towns and cities with his father. The trips were usually for the purpose of negotiating with buyers and exporters, but his father had always made time to give praise in the Imperial temples while they were there. In those days, it seemed that images and statuary of the Crimson Fists were everywhere, and the young Dasat had marvelled at them, finding it difficult to imagine what such beings would be like in life. Now he knew.
He had never imagined, not once in all his sixty-eight years, that he would speak to the Chapter Master, Lord Hellblade himself. He hoped he had covered the tremors he had felt on addressing that grim, austere giant. Perhaps the Chapter Master had taken it as the palsied shudders of old age, rather than fear.
Such a face that one had! So hard and angular. And so deep-set, hard and cold like a mountain winter.
Dasat was unused to fear. He had always lived secure in the knowledge that the Emperor had a plan, and all men were a part of it. He had believed his part was to live and die as a farmer who, in his spare evenings, took the good word wherever it might be received. When he had been approached by a group of the faithful who wanted him to lead a pilgrimage to Ivesta’s Shrine, he had been flattered and had even seen the honour as his due in a way. The group looked up to him with such respect. No man could have walked away from that. It was the greatest feeling of his life… for a time.
Then the nightmare began. Beyond the treetops, the pilgrims had glimpsed snatches of the fires in the sky. They had heard the roar from the Hellblade Mountains, and had seen night turned to day by the flash in the east. The others had turned to Dasat for answers, their fear all too plain. But he had had no answers, so he told them they should continue. Had he been wrong? No. The pilgrimage had been a worthy endeavour. He could not have lived with himself to have come so far only to turn back for causes unknown. It was shortly after that, an hour before the party was due to strike camp, that the monsters had exploded from the forest, swarming on the group, butchering a score before anyone even realised what was going on.
Dasat had heard of orks, but his knowledge was limited to the content of the traditional cautionary tales his father had told him as a boy. Small children heard such tales and were afraid, and their parents would tell them, ‘Pray to the Emperor every night, work hard in His name, and He will protect you.’ As he had grown older, Dasat had made the mistake of taking such stories less seriously. No one he knew had ever seen a xenos of any kind. Without experience to contradict him, he had started to think man’s dominion over the galaxy absolute.
Being thrown in a cage and forced to watch members of his flock endure hideous, sickening torture had quickly divested him of that misconception. And, if even Rynn’s World was not safe, then surely nowhere was.
By a miracle alone, by the intervention of the Emperor, who had sent His warrior sons to deliver them from evil, Dasat and the rest of the party lived. But for how long?
He walked silently, deep in thought, and the other survivors followed behind him. They, too, were quiet, cowed by the figures up ahead who hacked and slashed their way through the dense forest without ever resting or talking. In fact, their silence unsettled Dasat. It seemed almost as if these blue giants communicated mind-to-mind, but more likely they were just using some kind of communication system installed in their helmets. They never took those helmets off. In fact, only the Chapter Master did so, and only when addressing Dasat and the rest of the pilgrims, as if it were important they see his human features. Then there was the woman, Jilenne, and her young. The Crimson Fists had rescued her from a farming commune somewhere to the south-east, or so she said. Dasat was pleased to see his flock fussing over her children. Even in the face of all they had seen, their humanity endured. His heart sank as he remembered the children who had set out from Vardua with his group. There had been nine of them. All had been trampled to death in the ork attack. At least they had been spared the horrors to which the survivors had been subjected. Surely they were with the Emperor now.
Glancing again at the broad backs of the Crimson Fists up ahead, Dasat wondered that they allowed him and his party to tag along at all. Surely they would make better time by abandoning their tired charges. He knew they were pushing for New Rynn City. At first he had thought his party would never be able to keep up. He had even considered suggesting to the Chapter Master that he leave them all behind, for surely nothing was more important than for the Crimson Fists to reach their goal and begin the task of repelling the invaders. But the idea of addressing the Chapter Master, or indeed any of these massive, stony warriors, filled him with cold dread. They were not like the murals or the statues. Those images had been warm, glorious things wrought by the hands of normal men.
These beings were living breathing myths come to life. They were Angels of Death, bred to kill. He could not begin to imagine what went on in their minds, though he suspected he knew what a few of them were thinking. The body language of two of them seemed downright hostile. Had they not been wearing helmets, Dasat could imagine them spitting on the ground in disgust whenever they looked at the helpless refugees. He made a special effort to keep his followers away from those two. He did not want to give them any excuse to express their impatience. One of them had been introduced by name, the famous Captain Cortez. He did not know the name of the other.
If Dasat had imagined his people would slow the Crimson Fists down, he was wrong. The Azc
alan was managing that quite well enough and, in fact, by presenting such a troublesome obstacle to their progress west, it allowed the pilgrims to keep up. The Chapter Master hadn’t explained himself, and Dasat didn’t expect him to, but he steered his Space Marines away from the few beaten paths that led through the forest. These paths followed the course of the River Rynn for the most part, and Dasat wondered if the reason the Crimson Fists avoided them was because the orks might be making use of the river and the paths to move troops. It made sense.
As Dasat was thinking about this, Molbas Megra, a cattle-hand in his thirties and one of the most outspoken members of the group, hurried his pace until he was walking by Dasat’s side.
‘They are not as I had imagined them,’ he said to Dasat in hushed tones. ‘Most of the women are terrified of them, even though they saved us. They are so… different from us.’
You mean you are terrified, thought Dasat. And of course they are different. They are the Space Marines, the Emperor’s sons.
Megra had always thought himself brave and strong, and had never been shy about telling others so, but he had wept openly when the aliens caged him. Dasat did not judge him too harshly for that. He had wept himself when the cage door had closed on them, believing a long, painful death was his imminent fate.
‘There is a highway just south of here,’ said Megra. ‘It runs all the way to the capital. Why do they not lead us down onto the road? Surely it would be faster than this. Safer, too, I imagine. I don’t think we should stay in the forest. Do you?’
Dasat resisted the urge to turn and scowl at Megra. ‘You would have us all exposed to the invaders? Trust in our lords. They did not save us only to have us die on the journey toward sanctuary.’
Dasat could feel Megra’s eyes on him, staring hard, a sharp retort forming on his lips. But the retort never came. From the thick greenery up ahead, a deep voice called back, ‘Danger will find us sooner or later, farm-hand. Pray only that we see it before it sees you.’
Now Dasat did turn to look at Megra, and saw that he had gone utterly pale. The voice from the trees ahead did not sound friendly. It was the voice of Captain Cortez.
‘H-he heard me?’ stammered Megra in disbelief.
Dasat scowled. Of course he heard you, he thought. Do the legends not tell of how their senses are far beyond our own?
No doubt they could see farther and with much greater acuity, too. What other feats were they capable of? Could they read minds after all? He had heard that some of them could. Did they realise, then, how afraid his people were, stumbling through the thick jungle in the wake of demigods dedicated to war? Megra was foolish enough to voice his thoughts, but none of the others were. They limited their sporadic talk to the comforting of Jilenne’s children.
Perhaps time will remedy our fear, thought Dasat. As they say, familiarity with a thing removes the fear of it.
It was something he had read in an old book a long time ago and he had taken it as great wisdom back then. Now the lesson seemed pathetically naïve and utterly false.
After all, he was more familiar with greenskins now.
And his fear of them had increased a hundredfold.
Twelve
Zona 3 Commercia, New Rynn City
Captain Alvez stood on the upper gallery and looked down at the ground floor of the Menzilon arcade. The arcade was a massive structure, a great open space, the arched glass ceiling of which rose some fifty metres above the colourful mosaic of the marble floor. Before the arrival of the alien horde, it had been an enclosed market, a place where the burgeoning Rynnite middle classes came to spend their time and spare centims. Now, it was an emergency refugee centre, serving as such since the outer districts had first been evacuated. The mosaic on the grand marble floor was bloodstained in places. Elsewhere, it was covered with dirty white sheets beneath which lay the wounded and the desperate. Not all those who sought shelter here had suffered injuries. Many simply had nowhere else to go. Their homes had been burned or blasted to rubble. Beside them, Alvez saw bags of possessions, usually not very large. These people had had only moments to grab what they could before the Rynnsguard herded them from the unprotected, unwalled outer settlements. Judging by their wretched attire, they probably hadn’t owned all that much anyway. There were children among them. Those young enough to remain ignorant of the true threat chased each other around the thick stone pillars that supported the ceiling and the galleries.
Alvez could smell human blood, lots of it. His hyper-sharpened hearing could make out every moan, every plea for water, for food, for something to dull the pain. He heard women weeping, crying out the names of their lost sons and daughters. Men wept, too, calling out to the Emperor, asking what they had done to offend Him, why He had removed His protection from His faithful servants.
Fools, thought Alvez. The Emperor helps those who help themselves. He has not forsaken anyone. He created Rogal Dorn, and the primarch created us. No ork will overcome us. Whatever the odds, the Crimson Fists will win out in the end, even if we are the only living things left standing on this planet. We will triumph, and we will reclaim this world.
He heard the sound of heavy footsteps to his right. An Adeptus Astartes was ascending the marble stairway. As Alvez watched, the laurelled helmet of a sergeant came into view. Alvez knew the chips and scrapes on that helmet well enough to recognise its wearer, though there were a few new ones, it seemed.
‘Huron,’ he said. ‘What kept you?’
‘The greenskins, naturally, my lord,’ said the sergeant. He stepped up onto the landing and crossed to Alvez’s side.
‘And your squad?’
‘Awaiting us on the Verano wall to the north, as per your orders. The trucks have arrived to evacuate these people.’
‘Good,’ said Alvez.
Grimm looked down towards the lower floor, and said, ‘A pitiful sight, this.’
‘Indeed,’ said Alvez. ‘Look to the south-east corner where no lights are lit. From there, the worst of the stench emanates. That is the dying place, for those beyond help.’
Grimm nodded. ‘Can the medicae do nothing for them?’
‘Short of euthanising them,’ said Alvez, ‘no.’
‘Then that is what they should do, and spare their attentions for those that can be saved.’
Alvez snorted. ‘You know the medicae healers as well as I, Huron. Even when the obvious is right in front of them, they do not give up, not even on a single soul. Our Apothecaries are much the same.’
‘I wish the Rynnsguard and the civilian militias were as stoic.’
Alvez frowned. ‘The commissars will keep them in line. There were more executions this morning. Desertion rates will fall for another few days, though I doubt it will affect the suicide rate.’
‘Their fear of the orks is so great that they take their own lives.’ Grimm shook his head. ‘It bewilders me. If they will not grit their teeth and stand strong…‘
He let his sentence hang unfinished. Stepping forward, he placed his hands on the sculpted baluster, and leaned out over the edge. Beneath him, he saw minor ecclesiarchs, their beige cassocks trimmed with black and white check, moving among the displaced and the desperate, offering words of consolation from the Imperial creed and its innumerable supplementary tomes.
‘Are they ready to evacuate, my lord? There is no telling how long we will have.’
‘Now that the trucks are here,’ said Alvez, ‘the senior medicae will start the process. Those with the best chance of survival will be moved first.’
Outside, gunfire was constant. The closest section of defensive wall had fallen less than thirty minutes ago. Two regiments of Rynnsguard infantry and a company of Leman Russ tanks were punishing the orks that were pouring through the breach, but the Crimson Fist captain knew it was only a matter of time before the defenders were forced into a retreat. The orks would keep coming, a ceaseless tide that gained ground little by little, until the entire district fell. One section of the city at a time, the
orks were slowly, inexorably, pressing the Imperial forces back towards the Silver Citadel. All the Crimson Fists and the Rynnsguard could do at this stage was slow them down as much as possible. Retaking lost territory was beyond them. The cost in life and materiel would be far too high.
As movement increased on the floor down below, and the first of the wounded were taken to the north exit to board the waiting trucks, Captain Alvez found himself thinking of Ceval Ranparre, the Master of the Fleet. Had he been able to get a ship out in time? Had any of the Crimson Fists spacecraft escaped into the warp? He hoped so. Though his pride protested bitterly against such thoughts, the reality was this: without significant outside intervention, all he and his Crimson Fist brothers could hope to do was to hold the line, to last out as long as they could. Beyond that…
From somewhere outside the arcade, a battle-brother transmitted an update on the situation at the breach. Alvez listened. It was a Devastator Squad sergeant called Lician. The sergeant’s squad had been charged with providing heavy fire support to the Rynnsguard 12th Infantry Regiment. Judging by Lician’s tone, things were not going well.
‘My lord, Colonel Cantrell has ordered his men into a staggered retreat. The wall is lost. Xenos are spilling into the streets now.’ Almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘These men fought hard, brother-captain. We gave them all the support we could, but I’m afraid their eventual loss was inevitable. The greenskins are pouring through like floodwaters.’
‘Were the habs evacuated in time?’ Alvez asked.
‘Many were,’ answered Lician, ‘but just as many were not. The orks are torching everything in their path.’ His voice took on a bitter tone. ‘I have never heard such screams.’
‘What is the position of your squad now, brother?’
‘We are moving back with the Twelfth Regiment. Currently, we are three kilometres east of–’
Lician stopped mid-sentence. Alvez could hear him conferring with another battle-brother. Then, addressing the captain again, Lician said urgently, ‘My lord. You need to get out of the arcade! There’s a–’
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 88