The Iron Warriors do not abandon their hunts lightly.
Jovian had utilised every means at his disposal to shake them, planting false tracks in the dust, doubling back through the shells of hab-blocks and foundries. He dropped single bolt shells into fires at random locations, hoping to peel them away from his trail with the delayed detonations. His enemies had divided their numbers, and then divided them again to scour the area surrounding the settlement. The last hour had left Jovian confident that now, of the twelve heretics that had attacked the wall, only two were actively pursuing him.
He heard the pair of Iron Warriors as they approached. Jovian knew by the laboured, waspish buzz of their ancient armour that they were near. There was something hideously natural to the sound they made, some unholy union of the mechanical and organic. They were not the unrecognisable golems of the Death Guard, nor the frothing zealots of the Word Bearers, but the infinitely broad spectrum of damnation and treachery soaked them all the same.
Jovian crouched on the second level of a collapsed tenement, cursing every whirl of dust that shook free from his own thrumming plate. He peered over the section of wall he was hiding behind. He saw them then, prowling the street below.
As the Apothecary had believed, there were two – at least, as far as he was able to see. The auspex built into his bulky narthecium gauntlet confirmed as much for this small section of streets. One of them clutched a boltgun, its casing ribbed with what appeared to be vertebrae of blackened silver. A ribbon of linked shells dangled from its magazine well, clattering softly against the traitor’s war-plate. Jovian noted the pair of frag grenades coupled to his belt, as well as a sheathed chainaxe.
The other Iron Warrior loped along with a more disjointed rhythm, hefting the bulk of a flamer with one hand. The heretic’s other arm ended at the elbow, a twisted stump of shorn metal dappled with brackish oil. Jovian recognised him immediately as the one that he had wounded earlier. They were now mere steps from being directly beneath him.
Jovian’s armour was the white of the Apothecarion. It was his duty to preserve the lives of his brothers, and failing that, their genetic legacies. A duty he was trained to fulfil at all costs. But above all, he was a Space Marine. There were no more brothers of the Genesis Chapter present for him to heal. His mind fell back upon the Codex, to the wisdom of the primarch on ambushes, asymmetric conflict and melee combat.
The floor crackled beneath his weight. The Iron Warriors froze, heads swivelling and weapons panning in their fists. Jovian was already in the air.
The boltgun barked, and Jovian absorbed the hammer blows of mass reactives exploding against his breastplate. The outermost layers of ablative ceramite shattered in twisting chips, but none of the shells managed to penetrate or destroy the musculature beneath.
Jovian crashed into the Iron Warrior bearing the flamer, interposing the traitor’s body between himself and his comrade to shield himself from the next shot. The heretic fired without hesitation, and only one round of the burst struck Jovian. The rest cracked against the other Iron Warrior, blowing great craters into his chest. His shield’s fist clenched reflexively from the pain, firing the flamer and sending a jet of roaring flame into the air. Jovian stomped down sideways into the Iron Warrior’s knee, shattering it, and hurled him aside in a single fluid motion.
The Apothecary lunged forward, dipping his chainsword and turning its teeth upward as he brought it up under his opponent’s bolter. Its teeth screamed into the trigger guard in a shower of sparks, savaging the firing mechanism of the weapon and the finger trying to fire it. The Iron Warrior swung the gun at Jovian’s head, connecting with his temple and driving him to blindness for an instant. There was a sudden jolt of inversion, Jovian’s legs swinging up level with his head as the Iron Warrior dropped into a crouch and tackled him to the ground.
Jovian’s chainsword licked a glancing blow across the heretic’s faceplate in a burst of sparks and dirty smoke. Broken teeth spat and flew from the track. One gouged into his enemy’s left eye-lens, turning it into a cobweb of cracked emerald glass. The Iron Warrior snarled and grabbed hold of Jovian’s sword arm by the wrist, forcing it wide and smashing it against the ground until he lost his grip on the weapon.
Jovian slammed his narthecium gauntlet up into the Iron Warrior’s face. His palm hovered over the cracked left eye-lens as he fired his carnifex again and again. The Apothecary’s face became sticky with blood and machine oil made from blood. He bore the brunt of the traitor’s weight as his enemy’s arms lost the strength to support himself, and shoved him to one side. A heavy stomp as Jovian rose ensured that his enemy’s skull fractured. A second pounded the helm flat against the pavement.
The air ignited behind Jovian with a screaming whoosh of promethium. He threw himself forwards, liquid fire clinging to his power plant. Twisting around, Jovian kicked at the second Iron Warrior, knocking the barrel of his flamer wide. The Chaos Space Marine dropped the weapon, bringing his hand down to his belt. Pain bloomed on Jovian’s brow as the Olympian whipped a combat blade across his forehead. Hot blood ran into his eyes, turning his vision red.
A backhanded blow from Jovian sent the knife spinning away. Bringing the fist back around in a hook snapped the heretic’s head to the side. Jovian ducked and seized him around the waist.
Once more a crude brawl took Jovian to the ground, but this time it was his opponent’s back in the dust. The Iron Warrior jabbed his stump into Jovian’s midsection while throwing his hips upward in an effort to throw the Apothecary off him. Jovian spread his weight wider for balance and rode out the sweep, crashing his chest against the Iron Warrior’s faceplate to crack his head against the ground. The heretic snarled, reaching up and clawing at Jovian’s face. The traitor managed to hook his fingers over Jovian’s lower jaw, ripping several teeth from his mouth before a strike to his elbow joint denied him his grip.
With a grunt of effort Jovian finally managed to find the haft of the dead traitor’s chainaxe. He clenched the activation stud, gunning its motor and granting his enemy’s movements a renewed, frenzied sense of purpose. The Iron Warrior scrambled, fighting to get a knee between them and to wrestle the axe from Jovian’s grasp. The weapon’s killing edge skipped against the ground, spraying them both with sparks and bits of gravel.
Jovian took hold of the chainaxe with both hands and pushed down with all of his weight. The weapon’s engine sputtered and choked as the teeth ground against the rubberised armour sheathing the Iron Warrior’s throat. Its integrity held for a heartbeat before the teeth cut through it and shredded down into skin, flesh, muscle and bone. A strangled desperate curse bubbled from the Chaos Space Marine’s brass vox-grille as he threw all of his remaining strength into a final effort to pitch Jovian off him. Had he both of his arms, the Apothecary believed he would have succeeded in doing so. But he did not, and so he failed.
Jovian did not stop pushing the chainaxe down until it was embedded into the street.
It took a long time for the Iron Warrior to die. Even with his head severed, his chest rose and fell. His armour continued its hissing, arrhythmic buzz, and his limbs enacted clumsy, uncoordinated attempts to dislodge Jovian from atop him. Ten thousand years of rage and heresy would not allow him to go into oblivion quickly, or lightly. Finally, after seconds that stretched like hours, the heretic shuddered, and went still.
Panting and bleeding, Jovian sat back atop the Iron Warrior’s corpse, giving himself a moment for his second heart to return to dormancy and his breathing to stabilise. He touched a fingertip to his brow. The laceration was to the bone, but already the bleeding had stopped, drying into a crusted smear over flesh that had begun to reknit. He did not deem it a justified expenditure of what little coagulant foam he had left in his narthecium. He fired his carnifex and quickly scraped away the grey film that had caked around the piston cylinder.
He stood, exhaling as his body protested at a dozen points. A cursory self-diagnostic revealed various contusions and bone fractures, as well as a not insignificant degree of internal bleeding. His power plant was damaged, its outer shell savaged by the grenade detonation earlier and warped further by the flamer. The increasing weight of his armour was all the confirmation Jovian needed that its energy coils were bleeding power rapidly.
Jovian looked down as he heard a faint click from inside the severed head beneath him. Another came a moment later, from beneath the helm of the other dead traitor beside him. He recognised it immediately as the muted ticking of vox-transmission.
Time was against Jovian. Despite the brutal speed of the confrontation, lasting less than one minute, the noise it had generated would surely draw more heretics to this place. Hearing nothing from their comrades, they were likely already inbound at speed. He needed to be far away by the time they arrived.
Jovian went back inside the ruined tenement, and scrambled up to the second level from where he had first leapt. He dragged a stone away from atop a mound of rubble, and carefully gathered the bundle of armourglass vials from where he had hidden them.
Daenos. Thevolin. Grakal. Batra and Kiril. And finally, Sergeant Ryvan. Reverently he reattached the progenoids of those he had been able to save to the chains hanging from his armour.
Jovian pulled his helm from where it lay on the floor. A thin smile tugged at his lips, as the memory surfaced of him berating young Batra for going into battle with his own helm mag-locked to his belt.
‘No waist in Ultramar is as well-defended as yours, brother!’ Jovian had scolded, watching the warrior lower the helmet over his head, duly chastised. It had been mere days, yet now seemed lifetimes ago.
The retinal display activated as it engaged at Jovian’s collar seals. He cycled through each vox frequency, thinking that perhaps the slight elevation might boost his own signal. A wash of static filled his ears on every channel.
Then he heard it. It was faint, and nearly drowned into silence by distortion, but it was there. A single voice, deep and strong, singing a tune sung only in the small coastal cities of southern Newfound.
Jovian had direction again. A purpose. He locked the coordinates of the signal to his visor display and set off, running on a path towards it.