The Genesis Chapter squad had ceased all vox transmissions, relying upon Adeptus Astartes battle sign to communicate as they stalked through the shattered walls of the city. Jovian peered around an abandoned barricade and into the streets within. Trails of smoke coiled up into the sky. The fires were still burning.
Orbaun had been, in the years after the surface of Quradim had deteriorated, the largest Imperial settlement on the planet. Nearly one million souls called it home, eking out a meagre existence scraping what little of worth they could find from the hive city ruins. Since the coming of the Iron Warriors, what had been a destitute slum had degraded into a warzone.
Gunfire crackled in the distance. An artillery shell struck nearby, jarring the rubble that was strewn across the cracked streets. Jovian’s visor alerted him to movement, a column of dark figures marching in time three streets ahead.
Contact, the Apothecary signalled calmly to the warrior on his right. Infantry. One hundred metres. No Adeptus Astartes. The Space Marine gave a curt affirmation, and passed the warning along the squad.
The Genesis Chapter squad halted, going to cover in a ragged line. Flavius looked around the chest-high mound of broken masonry he crouched behind, scanning ahead. He swung back into cover, turning to the rest of the squad behind him.
Advance. Move in twos. Observe vox silence unless enemy force increases. Restrain bolter fire against mortals. Conserve ammunition.
The Space Marines signed their understanding and readiness. Two paired off instinctually, leaving Jovian to move at a crouched run to stop next to Flavius. The sergeant gave Jovian a short nod from his battered helm of cobalt blue.
They broke from cover. Rubble crunched beneath their boots as they pounded down the street. Flavius stopped at a corner of the intersection where Jovian had seen the enemy pass. Jovian crouched behind him, signalling back to their brethren that they were clear to advance.
Jovian felt Flavius tense, hearing a sound from within the building they stood beside. Jovian heard it an instant later. Two soldiers, speaking in low voices, stepped through a doorway onto the street.
Jovian’s combat blade punched into the first soldier’s chest, parting the flak armour vest like paper. A sharp twist of the knife reduced the heart to pulped ruin. The second made to shout an alarm before the Apothecary’s hand smothered his face. Jovian tightened his fingers, feeling the man’s skull collapse in his grip and then his body hang suspended from it. Slowly, he lowered both of the dead soldiers to the ground, laying their corpses in a heap back inside the building.
The second pair of Space Marines reached their position, training their weapons down the length of the street. One turned, his hands a concise blur.
Inbound infantry. Platoon strength. Small arms. One heavy weapon. Thirty metres north-west.
The sergeant nodded, signalling to fire at ten metres, when the enemy would be most exposed and unable to find cover before they were annihilated. Jovian racked the slide of his bolter. Flavius held out a hand.
Three rounds only. Close distance. Then blades.
The Apothecary gave a nod. They would need what little ammunition they had for when the masters of the mortal infantry arrived.
Twenty metres, signalled the other pair. Fifteen.
Flavius held up three fingers, lowering one, then another, before making a fist.
Jovian leaned out into the street, bolter raised. Targeting reticules crystallised into view across his visor, locking to the first ranks of infantry as they marched down the street. He thumbed the selector on his boltgun to semi-automatic, and squeezed the trigger.
His shot took the first soldier in the neck, punching clear through and into the man behind him before detonating. The second soldier burst as the warhead exploded inside his chest, setting off the bandolier of grenades on his shoulder and killing the men around him in a cloud of disjointed blasts and scything shrapnel. Three more shots joined the Apothecary’s from the rest of the squad, reducing the front ranks to piles of ragged meat and viscera.
The janissaries, raised from birth to fight in the servile armies of the Iron Warriors, scattered. They scrambled for whatever cover they could find, firing bursts of small arms in the Genesis Chapter squad’s direction. Another volley of four bolter rounds slashed out, claiming more of the janissaries as they reeled.
Jovian advanced beside Flavius. Every few steps he would stop, levelling his boltgun. The threat of further bolter fire was enough to send the enemy shrinking back as the two Space Marines sprinted from cover to cover. Chips of rock exploded around them while they moved, as the forces in thrall to the Iron Warriors returned fire.
Jovian had faced mortal soldiery in service to the Ruinous Powers many times before. They had attacked like a tidal wave, a screaming mass of abused humanity, some of them armed with nothing more than bits of sharpened metal or worn industrial tools and most with only their hands and teeth. He had fought the thralls of the Word Bearers, fanatical wretches with obscene gospel gouged into their flesh. The mortal servants of the Death Guard had been a wholly different foe yet just as repulsive, eaten through with sentient plagues that had reduced them to mindless, shuffling horrors.
Compared to those opponents, the human army of the Iron Warriors was a different species. The slave soldiers moved with tactical discipline and training, advancing in order by squad according to the orders of their subcommanders. They supported each other’s movement, granting cover with accurate volleys of autogun and lasrifle fire. When they faced the Space Marines in open firefights, the engaged janissaries withdrew behind the suppressing fire of their rearguard, circling around to attack anew from flanking positions or waiting until they could call upon armoured support.
They also bore equipment that more closely resembled an Astra Militarum unit than a mob of frothing zealots. Each soldier was armoured in flak, with webbing for grenades and ammunition and even a loose semblance of a uniform. Their leadership even communicated by vox, rapidly coordinating to manoeuvre their forces against the Genesis Chapter. They were the closest to a reasoned, professional fighting force that Jovian had engaged in thrall to the Ruinous Powers.
Even so, they fell in droves against the Space Marines. The might of the Adeptus Astartes was simply too far beyond the capabilities of any force of mortal humanity to withstand. Bolts blew bodies apart. Genehanced muscles cracked skulls and shattered spines. The Emperor’s Angels of Death reaped a devastating tally against the janissaries of the Iron Warriors.
Jovian had one round left to expend upon the enemy. He glimpsed a hurried grouping of soldiers at the rear of the engagement, struggling to set up a lascannon emplacement. The weapon traversed as it was locked to its tripod, glowing with building charge as the thick, segmented cable fed it energy from the power cell beside it.
Blinking away the other targets cluttering his vision, Jovian took aim and fired. The bolt failed to strike any of the gunnery crew, but they had not been its target. The shell penetrated the housing of the power cell, rupturing it as it exploded and killing a swathe of janissaries in a blinding flash.
A bayonet snapped against Jovian’s shoulder guard. He brought his elbow up, clubbing it into a soldier’s chest and inverting his ribcage in a snarl of splintering bone. The man collapsed without a sound, dead before he struck the ground. The rest of the janissary’s squad rushed him, hoping to unbalance him with the sheer weight of their numbers.
Jovian swept his chainsword out in a wide arc. Blood splashed his armour in a spraying torrent as he bifurcated four bodies. Another died, his face shattered by a blow from the butt of the Apothecary’s bolter. Formidable as they were, Jovian could spare no more bolter ammunition for their kind, especially ones confronting him at hand’s reach.
A snarl escaped Jovian’s lips as a barrage of las-bolts peppered him. Such fire would normally fail to trouble him, but with his armour in such an impaired state, shots were finding their way through cracks and broken sections, scalding his flesh and cutting it down to the bone. He shuffled behind cover as a Chimera ground to a halt at the corner of the street, panning around its turret-mounted multilaser and opening up with a storm of crackling energy blasts.
‘Brother,’ Jovian wheezed, pressing a gauntlet to his side and bringing it away bloody. ‘The enemy has called in light armour.’
‘I have them,’ came the reply over the vox.
Jovian peered around his cover, seeing the red-armoured figure of Flavius leap atop the Chimera’s roof. The crash of bolter fire drowned out the dry snaps of las-fire as Flavius targeted the multilaser. After a burst of exploding shells, the gun fell silent. The Genesis Chapter Space Marine tore the hatch from the turret, dropping a grenade down into the vehicle’s interior. Muffled screams were silenced by the crump of the detonation and a plume of rising smoke. Flavius stood atop the tank for a few moments as it burned beneath him, firing his bolter into the routing infantry fleeing the street.
Jovian moved up to the smouldering Chimera, converging upon Flavius with the rest of the squad.
‘We must exploit this advantage while we can,’ said Flavius, crunching down to the pavement. ‘The bulk of the enemy will have consolidated in the city centre. Orbaun is the last bastion for the planet’s civilian population. We must repel the Iron Warriors, if the people are to stand any chance of life beyond death or chains.’
The Apothecary looked across the cratered streets and crumbling buildings. As if waiting for his gaze, a tower collapsed, sinking with a plaintive groan into a slowly climbing cloud of smoke and dust. ‘Where are they?’
‘There is a network of subterranean shelters beneath the city,’ said Flavius. ‘We moved as much of the population into them as we could when the enemy began their invasion.’
‘Is that where Librarian Hesiod is?’ asked Jovian. ‘Is he among them below?’
‘Yes, he has taken what is left of the garrison and withdrawn there to fortify the position.’
‘He is resigned to a last stand, then?’
Flavius grunted. ‘What do you think we have been doing, Brother-Apothecary? While we fight here, Hesiod labours to send word for aid, but the immaterium revolts, and has thus far succeeded in resisting his efforts.’
The Space Marines looked to their weapons, reloading bolters and scraping away the gore from where it clogged the workings of their blades. Jovian went from warrior to warrior, checking wounds and applying his skills wherever he was able. He felt each of his brothers’ gaze upon him as he worked his ministrations, watching the gene-seed canisters bound to his armour.
All of them turned when the flash lit the city streets. The brothers of the Genesis Chapter watched, their eyes raised to the heavens as they witnessed the unthinkable.
The collision occurred in orbit, too high for them to hear it happen. It appeared as a shimmer, a single bright pulse of light that obscured any detail before flickering away into the early night sky. Framed by the milky shards of Quradim’s shattered moon, Jovian and his kindred watched the Excelsior die.
Pieces of their frigate spread away, like a hand stretching its fingers. Some would fall to the surface, trailing fire before striking the ground, adding more wreckage to a ruined world. Others would spin away into the void, forgotten in the darkness.
None of them spoke. Hope was not something a Space Marine could grasp with any comfort, one of countless parts of his humanity sacrificed to convert a child into a weapon. Yet, upon seeing his ship destroyed, their means to depart from Quradim in some rare contingency denied with finality, Jovian felt something cool within his chest. He would continue to fight, there was no question of that. Fighting was his purpose. But like seeing a brother fall, his progenoids beyond saving, Jovian felt an irreplaceable part of the Chapter slip away, lost and never to return.
‘We need to keep moving,’ said Flavius, seeking to rally the squad’s focus. ‘Should the enemy discover the entrances to the shelters, they will seek to take what they can and kill all else.’
The squad formed up, with Flavius on point and the others flanking Jovian, as they set off deeper into the city. The Apothecary felt his kin’s instinct to safeguard him, and what he carried. They knew well that a stray blast or lucky blade could end them at any moment, and that Jovian was all that stood in protection of their genetic legacies’ continuation. They could, and very well would die on Quradim, but if the Apothecary survived, they would still have the glory of serving to rebuild the Genesis Chapter’s future.