Only Blood - Guy Haley Read online

  Only Blood

  Guy Haley

  ‘There’s definitely something there!’

  Brother Sunno leaned over to look through the open door of the driver’s cab, shouting to make himself heard over the throb of Rhino’s engines. He had his helmet off. The atmosphere in the tank was thick and bitter, but better, he said, than breathing endlessly recycled suit air. The four Black Templars in the battered passenger compartment, two novitiates and two initiates, shifted their gazes from whatever internal space they’d been examining and glanced at the forward comms panel. The novitiates blinked slowly, as if perplexed. It had been a hard few days for them all.

  ‘Bring Cataphraxes to a halt,’ ordered Brusc, sword brother of the Ash Waste Crusade, commanding officer of this sorry remnant. He drummed metal-clad fingers on his armoured thigh, rattling out a brief, tinny tattoo in the Rhino’s passenger cab. Near silence fell suddenly as Sunno cut the engine. Small sounds grew large: the wind whistling over the tank’s fittings, muted by thick armour; the almost inaudible whine of power armour at rest; the thunderous breathing of the five giants within the tank.

  The communications array on the forward wall hissed unhelpfully, its screen set to seeking auspex and fizzing with green static snow.

  Brusc exhaled contemplatively, his eyes shifting to each of the warriors with him. Osric, Sunno in the cab, the novitiates Marcomar and Doneal, not yet initiates, already mightier than fully grown unenhanced men. The tight scar tissue on his face itched as it always did when he was tired. He did his best to ignore it.

  ‘Brother Osric? What say you?’ asked Brusc eventually.

  Osric frowned, stood, took a couple of bowed steps forward and slapped the comms array with his armoured fist. The screen jumped. Thick lines crawled down from the top. Electric snow returned.

  ‘Are you sure you should do that, brother?’ asked Brusc. ‘It is not the manner in which I’ve seen the tech-priests address the machine.’

  ‘Half of what they do is striking things,’ muttered Osric.

  Brusc barked out a laugh. The boys jumped at the noise, they were not yet acquainted with his ways.

  ‘That’s as may be, but you not know the correct preparatory prayers.’

  ‘It still works, sword brother, and I’ve got something. Listen!’

  ‘Fall bac… …o sector 15… Enem… eeee…’ The vox broke off into a cascade of menacing buzzes.

  ‘The signal’s getting worse,’ grumbled Brusc. His good humour deserted him as quickly as it came. He was mercurial like that, as Osric well knew. It made others wary of him, but not Osric.

  ‘The Season of Fire on Armageddon. What are we to expect?’ asked Sunno.

  ‘The Kannheim tower must be down again,’ said Osric. ‘The orks knock it down as quickly as Munitorum put it up again.’

  ‘First the satellites, now this,’ said Sunno. ‘The orks are smashing every broadcast tower and mast they come across. They are no fools. We have our orders. Retreat, regroup. Give the word, sword brother, and I’ll add more dust to this accursed storm.’

  Brusc said nothing. The wind outside hooted. Storm-blown gravel pattered against the hull.

  ‘What do you think then, brother? Do we investigate?’ asked Osric. ‘There’s supposed to be a field hospital hereabouts. It might be that. Standing orders from High Command are to keep watch for stragglers. They might not have heard.’

  ‘And it might be a nest of orks,’ said Sunno. ‘We are not subject to the orders of any but Marshall Ricard, and he said only to regroup. Let standard humans look out for their own. I say we move on.’

  ‘Come now! A nest of orks would be well. I could do with wetting my blade, not sitting in this box day in day out,’ said Osric with a broad smile.

  That pleased Brusc. He smiled too, a somewhat hideous expression on his disfigured face, and jabbed his finger at Osric. ‘Very well. Come on, you’re with me.’

  ‘Not a waste of time then, brother?’ asked Osric, addressing Brusc but speaking chiefly to Sunno.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Brusc, ‘but if I leave you in here hitting the machinery you’re likely to so offend Catraphaxes that the Machine-God himself will seize up your armour. Sunno, stay with the neophytes.’

  ‘Yes, sword brother,’ said Sunno. He turned back to the Rhino’s drive console, irked that his counsel had not been followed.

  ‘Best cover your mouths, boys,’ said Brusc.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ said the neophytes. Already the veterans of fifteen battles, they still cast their eyes down and spoke humbly whenever Brusc addressed them. They called him the Old Man, and not just the neophytes. True, he was the oldest living Black Templar, or so it was reckoned. Perhaps even the oldest of all the Sons of Dorn, saving Captain Lysander of the Imperial Fists, but it was not a name he encouraged here; there was another Old Man on Armageddon. Although far more ancient than Yarrick, Brusc thought the commissar deserved the affection and respect the name best represented.

  He regarded the men. Five of the crusaders left from ten, a pitiful score, and a tally of dead he was not relishing relaying to Marshall Ricard. Marcomar had taken the loss of his master particularly hard. His knee jogged up and down, and he gripped his sniper rifle too tightly across his knees. By Brusc’s assessment, Marcomar was close to failing the final stages of his initiation. ‘Cover your mouths,’ he repeated, more gently. He scratched his unnaturally smooth cheek then nodded at Osric. Both of them put their helmets on. Live displays burst into life across Brusc’s field of vision as his sensorium engaged. After checking his visual markers to ensure his armour was hale, Brusc activated Cataphraxes’s door rune with a thought. He and Osric retrieved their weapons from the rack: a chainsword and bolt pistol each.

  The Rhino’s rear ramp squealed open, its mechanisms fouled by wind-blown dust. Brusc muttered quick thanks to Catraphaxes’s machine-spirit. He worried it might grow angry, and not only from Osric’s less than reverent treatment. Few things made by man were suited to Armageddon’s Ash Wastes. Billows of dust and ash flooded the passenger compartment, setting off alarms in the rhino’s cab.

  Brusc and Osric stamped out into the dust storm. The sound of the alarms were lost instantly to the howl of the gale. They spoke the rites of awakening to prepare their weapons for battle, but they did not clip their wrist lanyard chains in place – not yet.

  ‘Ah, I’ve got a signal now. Imperial marker beacon. It is the field hospital,’ said Osric. A moment later, Brusc had it too.

  ‘Any vox?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Osric.

  ‘Then we better knock.’

  The Black Templars were virtually blind, would have been blind were it not for the spirits of their armour. Blinking arrows and compass wheels on their visor interface guided them toward the installation. When they grew close to it, wireframe outlines sprang into life, giving hard edges of light to the shadowy buildings coalescing from the brown air. Only when they were close enough to touch the perimeter fence did the shapes become identifiable as prefabricatum units, the same as could be found on hundreds of thousands of worlds across the galaxy.

  ‘As you say,’ said Brusc, only putting away his weapons when he confirmed by sight what his suit told him. He apologised to his gun and blade as they maglocked to his armour.

  ‘Are you sure it is still in human hands?’ said Osric. He was as reluctant to put up his own gun and sword unblooded.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Brusc. ‘I see no sign of orkish defilement, no sign of battle, even.’ They spoke via helmet vox. Their speaker grilles were full of sand, any words spat out of them snatched away by the ferocious wind. Th
e rattle of pumice and sand against their helmets was so loud, they were forced nearly to shout.

  Osric did as Brusc had, attaching his chainsword to his left hip, his bolt pistol to his right. ‘We’ll be lucky to get close without them shooting us,’ said Osric.

  ‘They’ll be lucky to survive if they do,’ said Brusc. The storm put him in a poor mood, and he was only half-joking.

  They followed the edge of the perimeter, a segmented, plascrete defence line losing its feet in the ash. ‘No one about,’ said Brusc. ‘Sloppy.’

  ‘Not even the orks are out in this,’ said Osric.

  ‘No excuse for a lack of vigilance,’ said Brusc. ‘There, a guard post.’

  Two hexagonal bunkers guarded a roadway into the camp that stopped approximately spitting distance from the gateway, already buried by the desert. The gate was a section of chainlink fencing in a wheeled frame, less a defence and more a formality. Osric grunted at the sight of it. ‘That’ll keep the orks out,’ he said dismissively.

  The troopers manning the bunker recognised the brothers for what they were and did not present their arms. One came out. Huddled against the wind he seemed tiny and frail, his outline partly hidden by veils of ash so that it looked like he was being abraded to nothing and would be carried off in fragments by the next gust.

  The Adeptus Astartes were solid in the teeth of the wind, but the guardsman did not have their strength or their armour, and rocked unsteadily in the eddies whirling off the hospital’s units. The man snapped a salute as best he could, a curious version of the aquila, repeated three times over groin, heart and forehead. The brothers banged their arms together in the mark of the Templars’ cross in response.

  ‘Lieutenant Sanjeed Ghaskar of the Jopal indentured squadrons,’ he shouted over the storm. A turban clad his head, a continuation of it, a band of cloth, looped around his neck and wrapped about his face tight up against his goggled eyes. It didn’t quite cover his cheeks and revealed a hint of a glossy black beard. His obeisance paid, he shielded this exposed part of himself with a gloved hand, and hunched over again, his other arm protectively over his stomach. ‘We are glad to see you! Or perhaps not,’ he yelled. ‘The coming of the Angels of Death often presages disaster.’

  ‘We go only where disaster is, this is true,’ said Brusc, his voice now projected from his speaker grille at maximum volume. ‘It will come here soon enough, I am sure, but not today. We are passing through. There are orders to investigate all Imperial outposts to ensure they have received the command to fall back.’

  Ghaskar looked up sharply at that.

  ‘You have not heard? The fall of Acheron?’ asked Osric, who now did have to shout. ‘It is good that we give you the courtesy of our visit then, as we are not beholden to act on these orders.’

  ‘We best talk inside. I grant you my permission to enter the Hospice of the Blessed Lady Santanna,’ said Ghaskar. He performed a shallow bow.

  ‘Most gracious,’ said Osric, somewhat sarcastically. Ghaskar beckoned them on, and the three of them passed through the gate.

  Privately Osric added to Brusc, ‘It is going to take me a week to repair the finish on my armour.’

  ‘One must honour one’s battlegear, did I teach you nothing?’ asked Brusc, although his tone was light. This was the way between them – once master and pupil, they had long been friends. Both shared certain characteristics of irreverence. The bond between had always been strong.

  ‘I enjoy it repairing my gear, and I humbly honour it. Who doesn’t? It is a fine time to meditate and pay thanks to the Emperor that one still lives and reflect upon the fight. Only it is unsatisfying repairing damage from the weather rather than that won in good, honest battle. What prayer and glory can I offer to the Lord of Man through polishing out sand scratches?’

  Brusc looked around as they passed through the rough streets of the facility. It was built on the standard Astra Militarum grid pattern, a north-south and east-west road leading to gate sites, although they had instated only one here, at the west. Side roads led off between buildings. It was small, an unimpressive place barely two hundred metres across each side. A difficult site to hold. A challenge.

  ‘Something tells me brother,’ he said, ‘that you may soon get your wish to offer true praise. I feel the Emperor’s hand at work here.’

  They were directed into a long low prefabricatum, one of forty indistinguishable from the rest. Inside was a medicae ward of thirty or so beds. The astonished wounded stared at the giants in their midst as they strode through the flimsy building, showering dust from their scored black armour. The whole prefabricatum rocked under their tread.

  Lieutenant Ghaskar led them to a busy woman by a dying man’s bed at the far end of the room. ‘Sister Rosa of the Hospitallers of the Adepta Sororitas,’ he said, then made his leave.

  Sister Rosa was a squat, unlovely woman with hard features and grey hair. Her face was blemished with numerous rad-moles. Her pleasure at seeing fellow warriors of the faith was at best guarded, turning soon to outright annoyance when they relayed their message. She stepped away from the dying man, drawing the Space Marines after her as she checked the charts of other soldiers.

  ‘We cannot leave,’ she said.

  ‘You must,’ said Brusc. ‘This entire sector is collapsing, thanks to the treachery of von Strab. The orks are regrouping, their warbands joining. Their outriders are heading this way.’

  ‘We will remain,’ she said stubbornly, ‘until the tempest has expended its strength.’ She moved onto another bed.

  ‘Sister, this storm will not blow over for several days,’ said Brusc.

  ‘And when it does blow over, we shall be ready to depart for Infernus.’

  ‘You must leave now. All forces are falling back to Hive Helsreach. When the storm blows over, the orks will be ready to attack. They will destroy you,’ said Brusc sharply.

  ‘Come now, show some respect, she is of a holy order,’ said Osric privately. ‘She is as marred as you by her service. You do little honour to our order or your title as sword brother.’ Publicly, he said, ‘Forgive my brother. We are a choleric breed, more given to attack than consideration.’

  Sister Rosa pressed her lips tightly together.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Brusc continued, with a glance at his ex-pupil, ‘I am correct. We have orders to fall back ourselves. This is no easy thing for us to do. Every part of our being urges us to go onwards and avenge our losses. But we will not. Considered retreat is the right course of action, if only so we might advance again refreshed and rearmed. You must come with us. This hospice was behind friendly lines. It is no longer. The orks are closing in, and will move on you when the weather allows. The materiel is unimportant. Leave now.’

  She withdrew her head, sharply, multiplying her chins to three. Her face was etched with a scowl. ‘You do not understand. I do not speak of materiel, but the wounded. Not all of my patients can be moved without great care. I cannot pack up the facility at such short notice. I will not go.’

  ‘Then you must bring what you can, and help those who can move. This is no time to be sentimental. We shall offer the Emperor’s Mercy to those who will not survive the trip,’ said Brusc.

  ‘I have received no orders from my superiors,’ she said.

  ‘You have heard them from me,’ said Brusc.

  ‘Neither you, brother, nor your Marshall have any right to order me,’ she said. ‘“From many pillars is the Imperium forged, each to its own burden.”’ she quoted. ‘I, like you, am not subject to the whims of the Astra Militarum either. We sisters answer to a higher authority.’

  ‘True,’ said Brusc. ‘But the orders make sense. Our Marshall has followed suit, ordering us in the same manner that other units have been ordered. He is a wise man, well-versed in the arts of war. His wisdom should be enough to convince you. I question your own wisdom if it is not.’

 
‘What do you suggest then?’ huffed Rosa.

  ‘We can offer you our protection and guidance back to Imperial lines. Stay here, and you will perish.’

  ‘If it is the Emperor’s will, then so be it,’ she said.

  ‘She’s a stubborn one,’ said Osric privately. ‘I like her. She’s an awful lot like you.’

  The sister stood tall, and continued. ‘You are correct. Without you we shall perish. So then do your duty. Remain here and protect us while we make ready to leave,’ she said.

  Osric gave a throaty chuckle. ‘She is like you.’

  Brusc shifted his weight, his dust-clogged armour plates rasping over one another under his dirty white surcoat. ‘Give me one reason, one reason alone why I should defy the orders of my Marshall and stay here to defend this collection of broken men,’ he said.

  ‘Blood,’ she said immediately. ‘Only the blood of the faithful can hold back the darkness. We are all the Emperor’s proxies. His light shows the way, but he cannot act directly. Through us,’ she pointed at her own chest. ‘Through me, him, them, the ill and the wounded. They are all the Emperor’s instruments, as much as you are, lesser though they are, broken though they are. They are the blades of His will, they have been tested in battle, and come back honed. When they are healed they will fight better for it, and you would waste them without a thought. You stand there before me, ‘brother’,’ she mocked him with the word, ‘and chide me for sentimentality, but you are mistaken. It is not sentimentality that will have me stay here, but the Emperor’s purpose. I know of your chapter, brother. You crusade and crusade and crusade. But you cannot cleanse the galaxy on your own. Even if you could, could you hold your conquests? Every world? To your credit, your order alone in all the Adeptus Astartes I have witnessed count yourself as true believers, warriors of the Divine Emperor. So tell me, crusader, by whose authority do you cast aside the instruments of our God? You discard His tools, and in doing so you defy His will. Not even your vaunted Marshall has the impertinence for that.’

  Brusc stared at the woman. Her head came only as high as the heraldic cross on his surcoat. He considered leaving, he considered telling her that, actually, it was by Marshall Ricard’s authority that he would abandon these broken tools of the Emperor to the choking sands because there were others more worthy of his efforts.